Oct 23, 2014 VueScan's most obvious competition is SilverFast Ai Studio 8, another, significantly more expensive, scan utility that also works with a long list of scanners from various companies, and also. VueScan is a computer program for image scanning, especially of photographs, including negatives. It supports optical character recognition (OCR) of text documents. The software can be downloaded and used free of charge, but adds a watermark on scans until a license is purchased.
VueScan
VueScan is inexpensive third party scanning software which supportsmany (if not almost all) film scanners, and many flatbeds too.Visit www.hamrick.com. One feature is that if you don't have any drivers for your scanner, and if your scanner is supported, in many cases it will work. Try the free trial. There are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Vuescan Update
VueScan's major claim to fame is its simple and accurate colorcorrection from color negatives. This is often difficult, and VueScangenerally makes it easy. VueScan supports the scanner's special hardware,like batch scanning, auto-focus, any infrared channel for dust andscratch suppression, and multi-scan to reduce scanner noise in the darkareas of slides. VueScan can often multi-scan with scanners that do notsupport this, using multi-pass scans. VueScan can often retrieve the fullbit depth of data from scanners that otherwise only output 24 bits.
VueScan is a standalone program. A TWAIN interface is not provided, itinstead accesses the scanner hardware directly at low level. VueScan isoften faster than the scanner's original software, both scan and focus.You can still use the scanner's original software if desired.
Selecting negative film type helps correct the specific orange filmmask color, and VueScan provides over 200 film types. But it's a harderproblem because any irregularity in film exposure or film processingshifts the color balance of the film. Correction of color negative filmis rather difficult in general practice, but VueScan specificallyaddresses this problem.
VueScan is an easy program to use, it is largely automatic, and itsdefaults are preset for the goal of achieving best results with the mostaccurate color. If it seems difficult to use, you're likely diddling toomuch, trust it more, try the defaults. All you really need to set is scanmode and perhaps film type, and it can do the rest. You can size thepreview and histogram window as large as you like.
You may sometimes want to tweak Brightness to affect midrangebrightness (VueScan Brightness works as a multiplier to Gamma, same asany histogram Midpoint control). But otherwise, the main tone setting youmay want to change is the Color Balance. Depending on the image content,one of these may be better than the others.
White Balance adjusts the RGB settings to try to make the image lookwhite, often very desirable. Auto Levels adjusts the RGB settings fromthe histogram maximum data values, which then map to white. If the scenelighting was sodium lamps or an orange sunset, Neutral probably worksbest. Images without neutral colors such as gray or white, perhaps imagesof all green foliage or flowers, may not like White Balance mode, butmore nearly typical images (people and places) likely will love it. Thenthe Auto Black and White Points clip away the specified percentage of thetotal pixel values. VueScan's defaults clip minimally, if at all, toretain the full data, to NOT discard shadow detail, giving all the rangethat a negative can give, perhaps a flatter image than you are used to,but it's all there.
You can set the Auto Black and White Points for greater contrast byclipping more, say 0.5% at Black. My own preference is to use thedefaults for its magic (good color balance), and tweak contrast later inPhotoshop (retaining that data allows choices). For typical scenes,following up with Photoshop Auto Levels (0.5%) is often fantastic. Thatclipping often enhances image contrast and colors perfectly, butsometimes it's the wrong thing to do. It does discard some shadow detailthat VueScan tried to retain.
VueScan is not an image editor; you can use Photoshop for that.VueScan's strength is to provide very good color, easily. That is nosmall feat, especially from negatives.
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Vuescan Torrent
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