Vuescan Vs Canon IJ Scan utility. I unravel what works best in this video.

Daily scanning can be a chore. Using an efficient scanning package can help streamline your workflow such as a Scanning software for multiple images at once. Vuescan is a premium scanner /driver software. £70 is a lot of money for a driver with a software front end. We buy a scanner because we want to scan images, likewise, we buy scanner software to help us scan those images.  What does Vuescan have to offer to help us scan our images? I run a test with a Canon brand of software, to find out which scanning software for multiple images at once is best.

Vuescan up is against Canon’s software Canon IJ Scan Utility Scangear. The Canon software can only be used with Canon scanners.

Video Transcript

Image-restore here and today I’m going to compare two scanning Apps, Vuescan that’s the software that pertains to be usable with just about any scanner and the Canon ScanGear utility or the “IJ Scan utility” from Canon and in particular in relation to scanning multiple images on a  flatbed.

Sometimes we obtain photos of different sizes, perhaps credit card size or smaller. Postcards and larger and smaller and strange and weird shapes occurred throughout the development of photography. We want to scan them all on our scanner, we arrange them to the best fit so we can get the best use of the space and we want to scan them all at once.

Let’s have a look at how the two companies approached the scanning of multiple photographs on a flatbed.

Vuescan

Let’s start with Vuescan’s software which is the paid-for version and costs about 70 quid. Let’s have a look at what we’ve got to do. We go to “file” and “default options” and that re-sets everything back to the default Hamrick the producers of this software, have a dedicated “how to scan multiple photos on a flatbed scanner” page and ill link to that in the description.

https://www.hamrick.com/support/how-to-guides/how-to-scan-multiple-photos-on-a-flatbed.html

After you’ve set the options back there to “default”, you go to the “input tab” and select “standard options .”

From here your scanner should be detected, it should show you the scanner there, the “mode” should be “flatbed”, “Media” should be selected to “colour” and “media size” selected to “maximum” and the “file type” set to “jpg”. That’s all the options you need in there, you can select your default save folder up there and your naming conventions here if you like. Go to the “crop tab” and in the “crop  tab” they suggest we use “auto” and “auto offset” should be ticked or set to on, “multiple crop” to “auto” and you can choose your “preview area” if you wish in that option there and then you can hit the “preview” or the “scan”.

I’ve got a number of photos on my flatbed, let’s take a look and see what happens. Ideally, I would want to be able to select all of these photos and perhaps, change the resolution of the smaller one because I want to print that certain size and a bigger one,I want to reduce the scanning resolution if I don’t want to print that as big and I might want to change the “auto-correction” on this image here because it’s faded. Let’s have a look at what we can and can’t do.

So it has automatically said we have two photos, it has highlighted the first but unfortunately, it hasn’t highlighted any at all, it has just drawn a box randomly in the middle of the screen. There is an arrow here that seems to imply we can change the size, so let us drag that around to fit that box there, it also seems to have made some slight adjustments very quickly. Can I further adjust this scanning resolution of that or the colour settings to this particular selection? Let’s have a look.

“Input”, “colour”,” preview resolution”, “scanner resolution”. Ok so I want to change that one there to 1200 so hopefully, that one is now set to 1200, let’s have a look at the different image now. Press the control key and I can draw a box around that one, that’s good so can I press ctrl key into a box around this one? I can’t!

Ok well, it appears that you can’t select any other photos Poto 2. Can  I change anything on that one, colour? is their colour balanced? no! dust and scratches? There are no fading corrections as such and nothing in the output. Very confusing. I do not know what’s going on with this software. The obvious place to look for cropping individual photos would be in “Crop”.  I think this automatic software basically says you can just do 2 and it’s going to do 2 and if they do it will be whatever it likes, it leaves you with no option but  to do it do what it says

Canon

In comparison let us go over to the Canon IJ scanning utility,  and you can select Scan-gear from h. I hit the preview again just to show you how it comes up from the start And this gets a rubber banding box around the images. If I don’t want one image so I could either rescale the box to fit this image here, or I could have deleted it and start all over and start afresh.

Start by dragging a box around the image of what I want to scan, it doesn’t take long to do, just seconds and then over here and I can adjust all of these options. All these options for this one bounding box. I’ve got “reduce dust and scratches”, got all of the “fading options” here for a quick fix or start of an improved scan. Up here I can select how big, and see how big it’s going to be in the input.

Currently, at 2400 dots per inch this image will wind up as 9000 x 6000, I don’t really want it that big so lets scan at 600 no I’ve got an image of 2000 by 1000. Now to add another image into this. do I select control and drag Box yes I can do or I can just literally click and drag Box and I’ll add images as we go.  Let us just quickly scan this, rather outline these and then I can change the settings.

I just click on this, change the settings here so I want to scan that one now at 1200, that gives me an output of 5000 x 3000. I want fading, in correction as none but I want a bit of backlight correction and this one here, fading correction none, backlight correction on, there! I want to scan that one at 100 DPI giving me 500 by 400. I can change the individual settings on each of those images.

That didn’t take very long, I could do that no problem and course if you maximize your space on this flatbed area here, maybe another image in here, you could scan the area and you could fill your bed and use the best option there’s nothing is nothing broken about that, that’s very simple and easy to do and then, of course, I hit my scan button and that would scan them all into my default folders id selected and I could work on them in Photoshop.

In comparison, of course, we’ve tried to do that in Vuescan and well I’m a bit baffled really you spend 70 quid on software and you expect to be able to scan more than one photograph on your flatbed. Scanning software for scanning, in terms of being flexible, the basic thing you want to do is scan and scan a lot of images, who would buy scanning software just to scan One image? I think they missed a trick there!

Maybe Vuescan has something to say about that maybe if you scan can explain just how you go about scanning each photo on a flatbed multiple images with multiple settings because ultimately make your life easier are you may want to scan a very small photo the high DPI so you can print it very big you may want to scan a very big photo at a lower DPI because you don’t want to print it very big and it saves you that work afterwards and think that should be a basic feature of any scanning software.

So I hope you like the comparison there,  let me know if you liked it or if you didn’t like it and I’ll see you again next time

Vuescan’s support page for scanning multiple images on one page. https://www.hamrick.com/support/how-to-guides/how-to-scan-multiple-photos-on-a-flatbed.html

For all related scanning topics visit my scanning guide or you have any scanning you need me to do get in touch.