Re: VueScan Improvements Was: Re: filmscanners: Polaroid Insight vs. Silverfast AI vs. Vuescan

["Maris V. Lidaka, Sr." <mlidaka@ameritech.net>]

What scanner to you use?  Do you usually (always) scan slides or film?  And 
what specifically wrong with the scan results?  Then we could make suggestions.

One of the common complaints about Vuescan is that the image is bland or 
washed-out, but this is what Vuescan is designed to do.  Most scanner software 
is designed to do black and white point tweaking, color control tweaking, and 
other Photoshop-like adjustments in the scanner software so that hopefully you 
would have to do minimal further adjustments in PS or your graphics program.

I prefer to do all of my tweaking in Photoshop and Vuescan's strength and 
design is to capture all of the available information in the film and transfer 
it to Photoshop or whatever to do all adjustments in a program designed to do 
such adjustments, with Levels and Curves and layers and everything else that is 
available.

Maris

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Preston Earle" <PEarle@triad.rr.com>
To: <filmscanners@halftone.co.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2001 6:44 PM
Subject: VueScan Improvements Was: Re: filmscanners: Polaroid Insight vs. 
Silverfast AI vs. Vuescan


| After struggling for some time to understand VueScan and get decent
| scans from it, I finally get pretty good scans most of the time, though
| I'm not sure why. I think the difficulty is in the User instructions and
| Help Files. If they were as good as the program, it would be worth $100!
| 
| It's probably a lot to expect that a talented software programmer would
| also be a terrific technical writer. Further, someone who knows the
| program inside out can have difficulty seeing just what a new user needs
| to know (and how to explain it).
| 
| The Help files contain a lot of information about what a guy *can* do,
| but it doesn't give much help as to what he *should* do.
| 
| Perhaps it would be helpful for some of you guys who know the program
| from a user's standpoint to write some instructions on how you scan,
| what settings you use (and why), what works for you and what doesn't.
| Knowing what scanner you use and your expectations (low, medium, high)
| would be helpful. Us neophytes could study through them and pick up a
| lot of knowledge you've dredged from the hard school of experience.
| 
| Ed could then concentrate on improving the software.
| 
| Preston Earle
| PEarle@triad.rr.com
| 
| 
|