Vuescan V SilverFast with LS5000 and Leopard

[antistatic]

I have just taken delivery of a Coolscan LS5000 and will need some 3rd party software to run it on Mac OS 10.5

The choice seems to be between Vuescan and SilverFast. Most of the scanning will be B&W negs with the occasional colour neg or slide. PP in Aperture. I would want to print to A3+ size max. Is there any advantage with Silverfast that justifies the exta cost? Does anyone have a workflow with this gear or similar that works for them?

I have done a search of the forums (before anyone asks) but there has not been much posted recently and Im understand both companies have updated their product in the recent past.

Any help or advice appreciated.

David

 

[kurotama]

Hello anitstatic,

I use Coolscan VED on Mac OS10.5. I use Aperture and Photoshop CS3 for Post Processing. Happy to find a mac user here.

A couple of years ago, I looked at the SilverFast before paying for Vuescan. It seem to me that SilverFast is designed to be a one-stop scan solution with all the goodies loaded while Vuescan seemed more like input solution to create a good 16-bit tiff file. I decided on Vuescan because scanned image will anyhow need post processing.

One nice feature of Vuescan I found is that it let Nikon scanner scan twice per frame with high and low sensitivities (or sensor exposure). It greatly reduces noise and recover details in shadowy area. Though Vuescan uses wordings for functions and settings that are not used in Photoshop, making me crazy. Well, then its the same way in Aperture...

In Aperture I found its gets quite slow as you add effects on the 16-bit tiff file the Vuescan spits out of. Apature keeps the original image intact and renders effects on-the-fly, so its very power hungry and gets quite sluggish as you add effects on a image. Also if you have a couple of gigs of scanned images in one album or folder, you will see more of the rotating beach ball or sometimes it quits.

I like the color of Apature though. It is better than Photoshop's "text-book-clean" images. Apature seem to keep more atmosphere or the "taste" of the original images compared side-by-side.

Have you thought about LightRoom? It supports Vuescan's RAW image flle, though I can't imagine the size of LS5000's raw image. 5ED's Vuescan RAW file is 150MB per frame!

 

[antistatic]

Thanks for you reply.

I have started with Vuescan and while I am learning to drive it, it seems to be what I need. I will look out for the spinning beach ball of death as the files get bigger 😱

I gave LightRoom a test run before settling on Aperture. LR is a fine program but I liked the RAW conversion of Aperture (from D300) better and the integration with other iApps. It runs fast on my Intel iMac.