On Sun, 6 Jan 2002 12:30:39 -0500 Owen P. Evans (opevans@istar.ca) wrote:
> . No one
> seems to disagree with my reasoning or they haven't yet spoken up.
Perhaps because (IMO) Vuescan and Silverfast are different tools, aimed at
different kinds of user practicing quite different workflows.
I would agree that VS is fantastic value for money, and that Silverfast is
- at least at first glance - incredibly expensive. However Silverfast's
main asset is that, at least in the production scanning environment it is
designed for, it is a one-stop solution. That is, there will normally be no
need to use Photoshop at all.
Of course you can use Silverfast to acquire a scan which you then do
further work on in PS, but for straight scans it shouldn't be necessary if
you have used it well. It is hard to learn, but in the context of
production use, once learned it is fast and rather cheap if you consider
that a Photoshop licence for the operator is superfluous.
VS on the other hand works best, IME, as a front-end tool for getting as
much as possible off the film, doing a first-run colour correction (incl
mask removal and inversion, if a neg). Whilst you can use it to produce a
final scan, it is much better to export the 16bit crop file and work on it
in PS where you have maximum good data to start with and maximum creative
possibilities. Personally I find this invaluable for colour negative and
using colour neg, VS + PS allows me to shoot stuff which I simply cannot
any other way.
So I think Silverfast is probably best suited to people who do all the
creative work in the camera and then want a scan, whereas Vuescan is a
bridge from film to digital in a workflow which expects to continue the
creative process on screen. You can do the opposite with each, but it's not
as natural or as satisfactory. So I think 'Silverfast vs. Vuescan' is a bit
'Screwdriver vs. Spanner', really. There's not much overlap, it's a matter
of choosing the right tool for the job.
Regards
Tony Sleep
- Online portfolio & exhibit; + film scanner info
& comparisons
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