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? Don Kellogg

[Ken Lee]

VueScan is affordable and can be used on an evaluation basis. You can do just about anything with it. You can also get in touch with Mr. Hamrick if you need to via email. He responds.

Personally, I have never been impressed with Silverfast: neither the user interface nor the results I could get. On the other hand, the same Vue Scan application has worked great on a variety of scanners.

[Oren Grad]

Scanner software is to some extent a matter of personal taste. But FWIW, after trying both Nikon Scan and VueScan, I ended up biting the bullet and buying SilverFast Ai. I'm much happier with it, especially for color neg. The combination of film-specific default color masks and comprehensive custom controls makes it much easier to nail down a reasonable color balance. And unless I'm missing something in Nikon Scan and VueScan - always possible! - it's also much easier to set the software to capture the full density range of the negative.

EDIT: I should add, I'm using SilverFast with Nikon 5000 and 9000 scanners.

[Ken Lee]

Oops - Good point about color and masks. VueScan doesn't do very well with that at all.

I forgot: I do mostly b&w, and even there, VueScan's collection of presets for different film types is rather weak.

[Frank Petronio]

VueScan is what I've used for film scanners but it is kind of bizarre. A good value and versatile but you have to adapt to it if you've been using other scanning apps. Frankly I wish Nikon would just buy Silverfast (and Capture One for digital) and fire all their software people because their software sucks!

[Oren Grad]

The one caveat, apart from the price, is that the SilverFast user interface can be described as, shall we say, exuberantly creative. It does take some getting used to.

[Brian Ellis]

Never used Nikon but I've used both Vuescan and Silverfast Ai extensively though mostly with b&w. If you do almost everything in Photoshop then I don't think it makes much difference which you use. If you do more at the scanning stage, as I did, then I would prefer Silverfast because it has more controls and more options. While I agree with Frank that neither is particularly user friendly, at least with Silverfast there's a very useful book about using it ("Silverfast: The Complete Manual" by Taz Tally which may or may not still be in print) and I found Silverfast tech support in Sarasota to be good. The tutorials are also very useful if you can stay awake while the guy with the heavy German accent drones on. Ed Hamrick of Vuescan was hit or miss with me, sometimes he'd respond to email questions and other times he didn't.

There is of course a sizable cost difference between Vuescan and Silverfast. If I had used neither I'd probably start with the Vuescan demo and see how you like it. The controls are by no means intuitive but I think you can figure it out well enough quickly to make the demo useful. If you don't like it then spring for Silverfast, it certainly isn't any worse than Vuescan in any way that I found except maybe for the learning curve.

[SamReeves]

For color negs, probably Silverfast. VueScan tends to have problems rendering a color neg properly. Otherwise VueScan does just fine on chromes and B&W.

[ljsegil]

For negative films, both color and B&W, I've been very pleased with the CF systems ColorNeg (now ColorPerfect) software for performing inversions. Rather than inverting the negative at the time of the scan, one creates a 16 bit RGB RAW positive image of the negative, imports that into Photoshop, and uses the CF program to perform the inversion of the negative. More often than not I've found scans handled this way have a more accurate and pleasing color (or grey scale) rendition than when the image is inverted at the time of scanning. I don't use/like Silverfast, but do use Nikon Scan, Vuescan, and Epson Scan, and do have to say that some images (unpredictably to me, unfortunately) do come out better when converted directly by the scanning software rather than CF, so I still frequently end up doing multiple trials to find the best result when scanning negatives, though as I said I most frequently end up preferring the CF conversion. Just another tool for you to try if you want to further complicate your workflow (and it helps keep my mind spinning while I work).
Larry

[Ed Richards]

Interesting how diffrently people see sofware interfaces. To me, Vuescan is perfectly clear, with everything laid out, while Silverfast AI Studio is utterly confusing. Vuescan has a nice system for calibrating negatives - you shoot a color checker grid, then Vuescan has an overlay you line up with it, and it does a custom profile. Works great.