This is the first in a series of quick ‘reviews’ of software that I regularly use for my in my work as a designer. I’m a self employed designer/photographer/web developer and find that often I can spend a lot of time trying to find the best tool for the job, or just keeping up with new releases. Hopefully by sharing the stuff I use with you, you might find out about some things you’ve not come across before.

Vuescan has been around for at least 1,000,000 years, or it seems like it!

In simple terms, Vuescan is an application to let you get the most out of your scanner. The range of supported flatbed and film scanners and cameras is amazing, most people will be hard pushed to find a scanner that is not supported.

I have found many benefits to using Vuescan, but for me the main three are:

• Simple to use.
• You don’t need to rely on manufacturers drivers – just install Vuescan. On a Mac you just drag it to your apps folder. Job done.

• It unlocks a lot of powerful features which can, at best, be tricky to use with much standard scanning software.

  Not only can you do *‘bog standard scans’*, but by changing the ‘input media’ type you can do OCR work and descreen magazine and newspaper scans (so you minimise the patterns from scanning these kind of pages). It can also create multipage tiff and PDF files, or consecutively numbered files of your scans.

  Vuescan also has support to process scanned negatives and digital camera RAW files. Instead of scanning the image, you just load a presaved file from disc and process in the same way you would a scan.

  By scanning IT8 (Q60) targets you can use Vuescan to produce high quality profiles to get the best colours out of your scanner. This isn’t magic, and is surprisingly easy to do.

  The options available in the user interface can be switched between basic, standard and advanced. This makes it easy to hide and features you won’t need and keep everything nice and easy to use. You can then get the colour balance right, remove dust and scratches and embed a profile if required.

  It’s worth the price alone simply so you don’t have to mess about with the generally dubious quality scanner software that ships with most consumer scanners.

  The website provides a good resource to get you started and hints for handy common tasks, right through to advanced professional techniques. There are also links to useful external resources.

  The price is right, currently a standard license is $49.95 and a Pro license is $89.95. The online ordering system works really well too, and invoices can be generated on demand which just helps to ease the process.

  If you have a scanner or digital camera then get Vuescan – it’s awesome!

  Vuescan is available for Mac OS X and Windows – this review refers to the Mac version although I believe that functionally they are nearly identical.

  For more information see the website at www.hamrick.com.

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