The VueScan Bible: Everything You Need to Know for Perfect Scanning

by Sascha Steinhoff

VueScan is the world's most widely used software interface for digitizing film and prints on flatbed and film scanners. This powerful yet affordable program supports over 1500 scanners and 321 digital camera RAW file types, and is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Much more than a simple scanner program, VueScan allows you to perform functions such as color restoration, adding sharpening filters, adjusting white balance, rotating images, and batch scanning multiple images. It also provides output to a variety of formats including TIFF, JPEG, and searchable PDF files (even all three simultaneously). The Pro version outputs to the RAW format and provides options for color adjustments, and more.

Despite its popularity, the documentation for VueScan does not provide enough information to use the full power of the system and makes it difficult to get started. The VueScan Bible is the missing manual for new, experienced, and prospective users of VueScan.

Genres: Technology, Photography, Reference

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Lloyd Downey · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are doing any serious scanning of photos or documents then you should probably get yourself some good software. Vuescan fits the bill as software that has some grunt and can do a lot of the things that you might want. However, I found the software rather hard to understand and certainly non-intuitive. That's where this book comes into play. It's not perfect. sometimes rather hard to follow...though some of this is because of the complexity of Vuescan itself. But it is certainly a great boon to anyone using Vuescan and their software package. I would certainly recommend it.

[Tim Wilder]

Extremely useful to me as I used VueScan to do a tremendous amount of photo correction.

[grundoon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I suppose if you've just spent $80-90 on software to make your (possibly sub-$200) scanner actually function, another $20 or so to actually get a grasp on its use isn't unreasonable. While it does a good job of just about exactly that, honestly, this probably should have simply been a commissioned replacement for the inadequate provided documentation. As a standalone, I'd like to have seen a bit more foundation, example, case study... something. Though invaluable, there's not much in the way of added value here, if that makes sense.

[Harald Felgner · Rating 4 out of 5]

It might sound a little old-school to recommend a book as a companion to a digital tool. Nevertheless, the VueScan Bible is indispensable for a very powerful tool that lacks a modern and intuitive user experience.