Vuescan vs Silverfast vs Nikon Scan

[Don Kellogg]

Quandry. I have a Nikon 9000ED film scanner that I'm reasonably happy with. The Snow Leopard OS for my Mac is not supported by Nikon Scan (yet). The question is whether to shell out the big bucks for Silverfast Studio or use Vuescan (both of which are supported for Snow Leopard) for my medium format images. I tend to do most of my adjustments in PS so I'm not sure about the manipulation of the scans in Silverfast but I have a lot of color negative films and wonder if Silverfast would be better for those color negatives? What about B&W? If Silverfast which version? Suggestions?

[rdenney]

Quandry. I have a Nikon 9000ED film scanner that I'm reasonably happy with. The Snow Leopard OS for my Mac is not supported by Nikon Scan (yet). The question is whether to shell out the big bucks for Silverfast Studio or use Vuescan (both of which are supported for Snow Leopard) for my medium format images. I tend to do most of my adjustments in PS so I'm not sure about the manipulation of the scans in Silverfast but I have a lot of color negative films and wonder if Silverfast would be better for those color negatives? What about B&W? If Silverfast which version? Suggestions?

I use Vuescan with my Nikon 8000ED, and prefer it to Nikon Scan by a fair margin. I have played with Silverfast Studio which came with my Epson V750, but I found it too fiddly and went back to Vuescan. Like you, I do my manipulations in Photoshop and Vuescan fits better for me in that workflow. If I wanted the scan software to produce final scans, maybe I would think differently.

Rick "thinking Vuescan is cheap enough to buy on spec as a hedge against software obsolescence" Denney

[Anthony Lewis]

I use Silverfast Ai Studio and HDR and think its pretty good. Vuescan does not support my Microtek F1. I now scan everything in 64bit iSRD mode and bring the RAW scan into HDR for processing. In HDR I apply apply a small amount of sharpening, noise reduction, scratch and dust removal, do a levels and curves adjustment. It is said to be better to do these adjustments at the point of processing your RAW scan instead of in Photoshop. Everything else I do in Photoshop, with a final sharpening before printing. However Silverfast is expensive, and like any software it is easy to use once you get to know it.

[ljsegil]

I must be doing something wrong, because my Nikon Scan is running fine on a new Mac Pro running Snow Leopard with a 64 bit kernel. I had heard it wouldn't work, but it sure seems like it's working just fine, and I prefer it to Vuescan most of the time.
Larry

[Eric Brody]

Hi Don, Hope you're well. I have chosen not to upgrade to Snow Leopard exactly because I cannot be certain it will work with Nikon Scan on my 9000, depite what the other poster said. I have also heard about Epson printer issues with Snow Leopard. Of course, if one gets a new Mac these days, there is not a choice. The sad fact is that is is unlikely Nikon will update Nikon Scan for newer operating systems though they should.

Alternatives are to set up a Windows XP partition on your Mac and use that with Nikon Scan, or to go with Vuescan, which many people love but I've never warmed up to, or the more expensive Silverfast. I use Silverfast on my Microtek 1800f (it came with it) for my 4x5 scans. It's a good program but I generally do very little in the scanning program except to set the white and black points. The rest is done in Photoshop.

I thought you were using a Phase back on your Hasselblad. Are you still using lots of film?

Best, Eric

[Don Kellogg]

Hi Eric, Yes, I am using and liking the Phase One back. Two things- 1. I have a very large library of images that I would like to scan that I have shot over the past 25+ years many of them were human figure images on print film and - 2. I kinda miss Velvia. I tend to like fairly saturated images (which can be added to digital images in PS with s curves and the like) and I keep going back to some of my film captures and find some of them pretty hard to beat.

[Don Kellogg]

Actually, the Snow Leopard OS does partially work with Nikon Scan. What does not work for me is Digital Ice. I was told by technical support at Nikon that it will perhaps work by the end of February. It takes me a long time to spot a scan and it would be nice to have Digital Ice. I also don't know if they also have ever developed a plug in to use with PS where the scan can be directly imported into PS.

[Ivan J. Eberle]

I'm familiar with the non-support of driver software in later versions of OSX. It's not a new issue, happened right after I bought a Konica Minolta DiMage Scan Elite 5400 with the later versions of Panther not yet being supported. That got fixed, and Tiger versions introduced, although later versions of Tiger-supported drivers broke with installing OSX updates.

I still run the scanner using Minolta Scan on a G4-chipped G3 B&W Mac using Panther without issue, and under 10.4.11 now with some issues (though it won't run as a plug-in under PS CS2 anymore). I'll keep the B&W alive just for use as a scanning station.

(The G3 was also one of the last Macs to have native SCSI-II, so it's worthwhile should I ever buy a drum scanner. Might also mention that this older Mac hardware is relatively cheap and stable and not prone to viruses even when you don't install all the latest upgrades. Scanning speed is largely hardware-limited so any reasonably fast G4 or later Mac ought to work well if you have the room to dedicate a machine to scanning).

Reason for bothering with it is that I tried both Vuescan and Silverfast awhile back and found their implementations of hardware Digital ICE and 16X multisampling to be wanting. They didn't produce scans as noiseless as the ones the Minolta software produced.The 16X multisampling is spectacular and rivals drum scans. I do prefer the highlight mapping that Silverfast features, however.

I'll second that ICE is a huge timesaver versus spotting at 100% with a Wacom tablet with archived film (1/2 hour or more per image, often).

[renes]

It's old thread but I did not find the answer which sofware works best with black and white films scanned on Nikon Coolscan 8000/9000ED. I just bought Nikon 8000ED with glass holder and would like to get best tonal scale reproduction and details from my negatives (most are Adox CHS 25 and FP4+ with 6x9 format) but do not if I should stay with supplied Nikon Scan or buy VueScan or qutie expensive SilverFast. What are your experiences and suggestions which to choose?

I am aware of that each software gets best results with certain scanning B&W workflow - I konw only Ed Hamrick’s tutorial on using VueScan to scan B&W negatives with a Nikon Coolscan http://photo.net/learn/film/scanning/vuescan-black-white , it may be best - he knows his product. What best workflow have you found for scanning B&W using Nikon Scan and Silverfast?

[rdenney]

You can try Vuescan for free. you got your answer--they all work fine, but there are some differences that may or may not be important to you. People have turned out quality work using each one. Since two of them are free to try, try them. The key is not which one you select, but the effort you put into making it work for you.

Rick "seeing the tyranny of optimality" Denney

[TomT]

Hello,

I have used Silverfast Ai 6.6 with my EPSON V750pro (for medium and large format) and Minolta Dual Scan IV (for 135). It worked pretty well, Recently I did upgrade my Mac to 10.7 Lion OS with result that SF 6.6 didn't work on Lion. Because license terms of Silverfast (upgrade form SF6.6. to SF8 is €199 for each scanner, €398 for both) I switched Vuescan professional for both scanners for US$79.95. Vuescan does the job as good as Silverfast. I am happy with Vuescan now.

Regards,
Tom

[renes]

You can try Vuescan for free. you got your answer--they all work fine, but there are some differences that may or may not be important to you. People have turned out quality work using each one. Since two of them are free to try, try them. The key is not which one you select, but the effort you put into making it work for you.


I will try them, but wanted to hear from more experienced in scanning what are their preferences.

[ericpmoss]

That's good to know. I have a 2006 iMac, limited to 2GB RAM. The new Silverfast (6.6r5 and 8) uses double the RAM for any given job, so I can't use it on any format above 35mm. When doing 6x7 film, the old version (6.6r4a) is a DISASTER. It hangs on every other save to file, and messes up every 3rd scan on average (skips to the 2nd pass before completing the first). The results, when one can get them, are great, but sheesh. Oh, and if you have Firewire external drives and the scanner is Firewire (e.g. Coolscan 9000ED), it will lock the entire system (hard reboot with all peripherals unplugged, and sticking the film in the scanner) if you don't turn on the external drive BEFORE you try to start the scan. Really really shoddy coding in there somewhere. Oh, and while the normal scan size on my 6x7 is about 580MB, sometimes it makes a file of 1.73GB using the same settings. Try again and the file will be 580MB. It's like some buffer is never being cleared. Bleah. I'm hoping that when I upgrade my iMac that Silverfast 8, which I already paid for, isn't as shoddy.

[Ivan J. Eberle]

Sounds like RAM cram, to me. Nothing runs well when page-outs to disk are required to view the image, let alone to crunch and process it as would happen with Digital ICE.
With regard to the file sizes scanning with Silverfast, does it offer an adjustment layer for ICE (or whatever they're calling the infrared layer-reading dust-and-scratch repair)? Such a feature would be sufficiently useful to offset the inconvenience of an increase in file size, (at least in current hardware, as adding several gigs more RAM is fairly trivial.

[ericpmoss]

Yes, the IR layer is really really nice, and I don't mind the space it uses at all. I *highly* recommend it when scanning old, kinda dusty Kodachromes I don't want to touch with solvents of any kind. You bring up a good point, that if I have clean slides, I need not add that extra layer to the file.

RAM cram (a good name, btw) is an issue to a point, but what SF 6.6.2r4a has is a set of actual bugs that crash the system long before any swapping starts. It behaves as though there are a lot of global variables controlling the expected scan size, target file buffer and so forth, and that they aren't being properly cleaned up between screen sweeps that detect settings. Without source-level debugging (this appears to be optimized C++ running in Rosetta), I can't tell for sure. In any case, I plan on being a good American by throwing money at the problem: December will bring me either a new iMac or Mini Server.