Fresh try with Vuescan

[PeterW]

Hi all,

Sad day in a way yesterday. My faithful and long-serving Windows XP Pro decided to give up the ghost. John couldn't find a virus or anything in it but every so often it would say "Windows has encountered a problem and needs to close".

The original disc for it is packed away somewhere amongst all the junk that was boxed up when I moved my den downstairs. I couldn't afford Windows 7 but John had a disc of Vista with a user licence that covered me so he suggested I tried that.

We loaded it in and asked for updates. Oh my! I forget how many there were, about 30 I think, and they took nearly an hour to download, but eventually it was up and running.

Then we had to load in the Vista drivers for my peripherals. No problems with either of my HP printers even though the big duplexing one is now about about ten years old. HP had the drivers ready to download.

Not so Epson. Nothing at all for my old faithful Perfection Photo 2450 flatbed. Since Epson has been taken over by Seiko all the support for discontinued products has been dropped.

I was quite happy with my old Epson Twain software because I'd got to know all its quirks but there was nothing else for it. I had to try something else.The only scanning software that seemed to cover my scanner was Vuescan.

I'd read all sorts of conflicting user reports about Vuescan, some saying it was the cat's pyjamas and others saying it was a waste of money and a load of cr@p with no user support at all.

Most criticism seemed to be about trouble getting the colour balance right at the first scan. That didn't bother me a lot because I usually fine-tune the colour afterwards in Photoshop, so I decided to give it a go. Hobson's choice really. It was either that or a new scanner, and I couldn't afford a new scanner that would take 5x4 negatives - have you seen some of the prices for a scanner that will take 5x4 negs and transparencies? Anything larger than 35mm and the prices just go up and up.

I wasn't terribly unhappy with the colour balance of the scan but what did annoy me a bit was that I couldn't choose where to save the picture. I guessed I wouldn't be able to save it directly into Photoshop but Vuescan wanted to save it only to the Windows picture folder and that was that.

I had to go to the Windows Picture folder, right click and open the picture in Photoshop before saving it to the desktop or wherever. Mildly annoying, but not the end of the world.

What pleased me a lot was the quality of the scanned image. It seemed sharper and more crsip than that with the old Epson software.

So all in all I'm reasonably happy. It's taking a little time to get used to the different layout of the toolbars in some applications, but Vista seems to like Open Office and Adobe's CS3 Creative Suite

Here's an example of a scan. I adjusted the colour balance a little in PS, but not all that much, and I realy don't have much to carp about in the finished picture.

It's from a 6x4.5 Fuji transparency using a Bronica. It was scanned at 1200 pixels/inch and then adjusted to 72 pixels/inch by 750 pixels wide for putting in Photobucket and posting here.



Anyone else got views on using Vuescan with an old scanner?

PeterW

[daveh]

Peter, I have vuescan recently installed because I got fed up with the HP software than came with the scanner. The Epson software was much better than that from HP.

The best point about vuescan is that all sorts of things can be changed, which is probably also its worst point.

You can set the folder to save to, or at least you can on the latest version. See screenshot:


I haven't been using Photoshop and vuescan together. I have IrfanView and Gimp on the notebook. Gimp doesn't seem to have direct scan in at all. IrfanView has, but only it seems using the HP software.

What I do like is that I can scan 16 slides (35mm) in one go. What I don't like is that the scanning crop doesn't sit even on all slides, so it has to be enlarged to do the autoscan and then the resultant scan cropped to the size of the frame. It will also do 5 strips of negs (6 frames) in one go. Vuescan does this much better than the HP software.

[PeterW]

Hi Dave,

Many thanks for sending the screen shot. Now I can save to wherever I want.

It had completely escaped me that OUTPUT would include the destination.

Put it down to coping with a new system as well as new scanning software ... or the fact that I'm getting old!

PeterW

[daveh]

Peter,

At least vuescan has put this somewhere reasonably logical, which is better than is often the case I think all computer programmers should take a course in setting things up. Even a quick glance at what everyone else is doing would show them there is sometimes a better way.

Take Gimp. I can find how to turn a photo through 90 degrees, 180 or flip. However I haven't located yet how to just rotate say 1 degree. I am sure it will be there somewhere, but the Gimps don't seem to want to tell me where it is.

I am still finding my way round Vuescan. It is good that the film type can be set, as long as you remember to set it correctly and you know in the first place which type of Gold 400 it actually is.