Re: filmscanners: VueScan 7.2.11 Available

[Julian Vrieslander <julianv@mindspring.com>]

On 12/3/01 4:13 PM, EdHamrick@aol.com <EdHamrick@aol.com>, wrote:

>In a message dated 12/3/2001 3:13:58 PM EST, julianv@mindspring.com writes:
>
>>  How hard would it be to provide a way to manually specify the focus point?
>
>It wouldn't be at all hard - probably a half hour's work.  However,
>it would further clutter up the user interface.
>
>One of my main goals is to simplify things in VueScan, so I'd
>like to see if changing the focus point in 7.2.11 to 1/3 of
>the way from the upper left corner satisfies most of the
>need for specifying a focus point.

I think that choice is a reasonable default for most slides.  When I use 
Nikon Scan, I have the focus set at a point roughly midway between a 
corner and the center, and this usually gives adequate sharpness across 
the whole image.

But as you probably know, the Nikon scanners have limited DOF.  Being 
able to manually set the focus point is very useful when I run into a 
slide that is unusually warped, or when there is some feature on the 
image which I want in perfect focus.

I suspect that a manually selected focus point would be very much 
appreciated by many Nikon users, and that they would be willing to 
tolerate the added interface clutter.

As for implementation, I can see two ways of doing it.  You could provide 
something similar to the interface for the "Auto crop" setting.  There 
would be an "Auto focus" checkbox, checked by default.  If the user 
unchecks this box, the tab redraws with two text boxes for entering x and 
y offsets of the focus point.  A better solution, in my opinion, would 
allow the user to specify the focus point graphically, perhaps with 
something like a control-click in the preview or scan window.  Perhaps 
when the user unchecks the "Auto focus box" you could draw a short string 
next to the box: "Control-click to set focus point."  I would prefer to 
see a marker in the image to confirm the location of the focus point.  
That marker would be valuable in either case, whether the focus point is 
selected with a mouse click or text entry, because it would reduce user 
confusion, and preempt support questions like: "How do I know if my focus 
selection was detected?"  "Are the focus point offsets measured from the 
origin of the scan rectangle or the crop rectangle?"  "Which is 
horizontal and which is vertical when the image is rotated?"

--
Julian Vrieslander <mailto:julianv@mindspring.com>