filmscanners: Re: Vuescan gripes

[Roger Smith <rsmith@unb.ca>]

At 5:24 PM -0400 7/19/01, Johnny Deadman wrote:
>While I like everyone else appreciate the extraordinary effort Ed puts into
>developing this app, I am frustrated that so little effort is put into the
>user interface. Human interface design clearly isn't something that lights
>Ed's candle, and why should it, but *something* needs to be done to make
>this app not only more user friendly, but also less problematic on the Mac.

At 3:45 PM -0700 7/19/01, Shough, Dean wrote:
>I used to complain about the VueScan interface but thought it had gotten
>much better recently.  Maybe I have just gotten used to VueScan and tend to
>avoid its quirks.

        I'm inclined to agree with Dean - I seem to be able to avoid 
most of VueScan's quirks, and admittedly there are more on the Mac 
than on the PC. Ed has explained any of them that I have asked him 
about, and he continues to improve things.
        I use auto-crop with a 2% border to make sure I include all 
the slide, and do my final cropping in Photoshop
        Like Dean I just let the cropooox.tif images accumulate in 
the VueScan window. When I'm finished scanning I drag the VueScan 
files onto the Photoshop 6 icon to open them, then do fine-tuning and 
resizing as necessary and re-name them as .psd files. Most of the 
time VueScan gets so close there is little need for fine-tuning. That 
alone makes it worth all the quirks.
        Doubtless my methods aren't as efficient as some people's. 
That is an important factor for anyone with a lot of scanning to do, 
so I can see that having some of the VueScan "features" not work 
properly could be annoying.
        I always have the preview box at full-screen size, which is a 
pleasant change from the postage stamp size previews most brands of 
scanner software give you.

        One of the neatest things about VueScan is how easy it makes 
setting up a new scanner. I recently switched from a Canon FS2710 to 
a Minolta Scan Dual II. I installed the Minolta software and had a 
quick look at it. I then opened VueScan, used the same settings I had 
been using on the Canon for a year and immediately started getting 
excellent scans from the new Minolta without the need for learning a 
new interface. The Minolta software is still there for the occasional 
slide or negative that just won't work with VueScan.

Regards,
Roger Smith