VueScan
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| VueScan | |
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| Developer: | Hamrick Software |
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| Latest release: | 8.4.17 / March 30, 2007 |
| OS: | Cross-platform |
| Use: | Graphics |
| License: | Proprietary |
| Website: | www.hamrick.com/vsm.html |
VueScan, a scanning program that works with most flatbed and film scanners to produce scans that have excellent color fidelity and color balance, replaces software supplied by scanner original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). It has a number of advantages over default OEM packages, and provides one standard interface for all scanners (and digital cameras) across the supported platforms, which are Linux, Mac OS X, & Windows.
VueScan does not use the standard but relatively slow TWAIN interface, which allows it to perform faster and enables use of some scanners with poor or no TWAIN support.
Images may be read from a scanner, or from files generated by scanners, digital cameras, or any other source, and processed with VueScan's graphic editing tools.
Scans may be saved in several file formats.
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[edit] Advanced Features
Among advanced features, of particular interest to professional users, are:
- accurate compensation for orange mask of color negatives
- restoration of faded colors of both prints and film
- Infrared cleaning to remove dust specks with IR-equipped scanners
- scanning of film negatives, transparencies and opaque originals.
- batch scanning of both strips of film and groups of differently-sized individual images.
- optical character recognition (OCR)
- color management of entire systems
- Single- or multi-pass multi-scanning to maximise quality at maximum resolution.
- digital watermarks
- and other features.
Color management for display monitors, scanners, and printers includes supporting use of commercially available laboratory-grade IT8.7 calibration targets IT8 and electronic colorimeter sensors. Color management of systems includes digital cameras if an IT8.7 target is photographed correctly. ICC Profiles can be created, imported and exported.
The Vuescan program can operate at 3 different licensing levels. The program may be downloaded free of charge, and is fully functional as downloaded at the Standard level except that dollar-sign watermarks are superimposed on saved images. For a payment of 40 USD a code can be supplied to upgrade to the Standard edition which will produce images without watermarks, and allow free upgrades for a year.
Alternatively, for 80 USD, a different code enables the Professional Edition mode. With raw scan files and Color Management (ICC profiles and IT8.7 color calibration), the Professional Edition allows unlimited free upgrades. The same program file is used, with different codes, for all 3 versions.
All editions include OCR and many advanced features. (Prices as of March 2007)
VueScan is updated frequently with bug fixes, additional hardware support, and new features, with a new release about every 5 days since version 8.1 was released.
[edit] Supported File Formats
- ICC Profiles
- Input: raw formats from many digital cameras.
- Input and output: *.DNG Adobe Digital Negative, a royalty-free raw format.
- Output: TIFF, PDF, and JPEG with compression parameters set as required.
- Output: text from the embedded SimpleOCR engine, which does not preserve the original format and layout.
- Output: Index file, thumbnails of the current batch of images assembled into a 35mm-like "contact proof sheet file" in Windows BMP format.
