Any scanner you get should come with a Twain driver, which will typically function as a standalone program for scanning, as well as scan images directly into most Windows programs. If it doesn't support Twain but does support OLE, you can use OLE to call up the driver and insert the scanned image. Early Twain drivers were uniformly primitive, falling short on ease of use, control over scanning, or both.
Some drivers still fit that description.
In some cases, they even qualify as mini image-editing applications, so novice and mainstream users can make whatever tweaks they need to an image without ever having to learn a second software package. Unfortunately, most image-editing software has been designed for graphic artists and designers who are willing to make an effort to learn how to use powerful but often arcane tools. If you're new to image editing, you should plan to spend some time learning new concepts for both the scanning step and the image editing. Gamma correction , for example, essentially lets you modify contrast level at different levels of brightness. Changing the gamma setting can make a tremendous difference in an image, and understanding gamma correction will help you get better results at both your scanner and your image editor.