Vuescan gives a call for features.

[clayne]

I agree. Vuescan lacks some of the most basic tools found in even the most mundane editor. Color balance, saturation, unsharp mask, contrast, warmer/cooler, etc... are all missing. There's that funky interface on the color tab with Neutral red green and blue, but it frankly sucks. You can right click a white spot but frankly that sucks too. You can have a calibrated scanner scanning a slide with a color chart on it and still have to mess with the colors just to get it to look like it does on the slide itself when held to the light. I know that some of this is due to the scanner, scanners condition, settings, etc... but it's not like Vuescan really gives you a lot of tools to fix it.

You don't want any of this crap when making a scan. You scan completely linearly without nonsense, then use a real photo editor to make post-processing adjustments.

This is the same analog to developing a negative and printing it with an enlarger. Dodging, burning, contrast, exposure, etc. happen during printing.

 

[beezil]

all you guys that think vuescan is somehow lacking should be subjected to silverfast8 for a while....

 

[Dana B.]

I'm interested solely in B&W. But I gave up on Viewscan, as it didn't serve my B&W needs. An update should include info for films photographers really use, from Tri-X to HP5. I found the software interface maddening, and not nearly as useable as my Epson's.

 

[clayne]

I'm interested solely in B&W. But I gave up on Viewscan, as it didn't serve my B&W needs. An update should include info for films photographers really use, from Tri-X to HP5. I found the software interface maddening, and not nearly as useable as my Epson's.

You use "generic color negative" as the film type. It's not supposed to look good, contrast and black-point wise, right out of vuescan. Vuescan is the utility to simply scan the negatives. Lightroom or otherwise is where you make the negative look "normal."

 

[cabbiinc]

You don't want any of this crap when making a scan. You scan completely linearly without nonsense, then use a real photo editor to make post-processing adjustments.

This is the same analog to developing a negative and printing it with an enlarger. Dodging, burning, contrast, exposure, etc. happen during printing.

No, I honestly do want that. I know what you're saying, I know your point. I'm not saying that it should be either one way or the other (and I should clarify that point). But honestly I'm just doing little tweaks for color and contrast for the most part in post processing and frankly if you did have those controls, AND THEY WORKED, then I'd use them all of the time for 95% of what I scan. Poor implementation though would make those features rather useless, much like most of the color correction controls Vuescan has now. It's much like some people shoot RAW in their digital cameras and agonize over post processing and color corrections and waste gads of time doing it. Other people get it right in camera, which I'm not trying to trivialize or state that that's easy, and just shoot jpeg.

 

[Dante_Stella]

all you guys that think vuescan is somehow lacking should be subjected to silverfast8 for a while....

Other than its batch operation, which never really seems to be complete in the Mac implementations, SF8 is a much better tool for getting scans to a 95% correct state in one step. And if you scan MF film, SF8's handling of filmstrips on the Nikon LS scanners is light-years ahead of the clumsy offset and frame spacing controls of Vuescan - because you can scroll the frames left and right in the overview window. In 6.6, at least on a PC, it actually finds all the frames perfectly with no further adjustment.

You might be put off by Silverfast's price tag, but I am put off by Vuescan's tendency to do whatever the hell it wants, notwithstanding what you tell it to do. Vuescan is a great program if it's your only choice for a scanner whose manufacturer-supplied drivers did not make it to OS 10.8. But even then, taking my Sprintscan 120 as an example, Polacolor Insight is much easier and produces much better files than Vuescan - the Vuescan advantage only really being in the scan-all-and-archive mode (which isn't that much fun - see below). I've just created a 10.4 partition and gone on my merry way with Insight and NikonScan.

And on this point of using Vuescan to "scan it raw," for black-and-white, it is not fun or efficient. You either have to use the Vuescan engine to recorrect the pictures later or spend about ten times as much time re-curving and re-leveling in another program (it is not a simple invert and auto-level exercise, especialy where any extraneous margin material throws off the calculation in Lightroom or PS). This method of processing also requires considerable extra disk space: for a 6x9 picture, your 300mb original and your 300mb finished product. That's 4.8 Gb for every roll of film. My best technique for processing has been to use Vuescan output each picture at 0.3, 0.5 and 0.7 brightness, line them all up in Lightroom to pick the best post-processing candidates for each frame, and then post process by hand. That's close to 10Gb per 8 frames, though.

Dante