A Comparison of Vuescan and Nikon Scan Image Quality
Photographers spend hours comparing equipment. It's time for software to get its turn.
By Walter Hawn
I've read much discussion on Photo.net and elsewhere about Vuescan vs. other scanning software, regarding grain reduction and softening of the image. Mostly (including my own remarks) we saw subjective opinion, with little backup.
To fix that, I made a series of 4000 dpi scans in Vuescan 8.1.29 and Nikon Scan 4.0.2 of a shot that included a lot of sky and some fine detail on Kodak 100UC. I used a custom film color and exposure in Vuescan and the default color neg (because that's all you can) in Nikon Scan. In Vuescan, I turned on sharpen, set IR cleaning to 'light,' and used 'white balance' for color. In Nikon Scan, I set USM to 5% intensity, 5% halo width, set ICE to 'normal', and all curves and levels to '0' or straight.
In other words, both programs were set very close to nominal. I ran four scans of the same negative on a Nikon CoolScan V ED and cropped a detail of the same area from each. The crops are presented here as otherwise unedited JPG files.
| It's some old (mining or quarrying)? equipment on US 287 north of Denver. |
| Now, full size JPG's cropped from each of the 4000 dpi scans: |
My conclusion is that Vuescan gives superior grain reduction, with less softening of the image from the gitgo, even with GR off. Its grain reduction, when on, seems to be less drastic and causes less softening of the image than does Nikon Scan. They both seem to reduce contrast, but detail is better kept in Vuescan. Besides, Vuescan is nearly twice as fast (on my machine) as Nikon Scan.
-- Walter Hawn is a photographer from childhood, and a writer, too. Mostly, he's made his living with words.