Other tabs

The crop tab has many options to allow you to crop the image to the exact size you want. This tab has probably got more options than you are ever likely to need, especially if you are going to edit the image in Photoshop or other application. I always advise people to make a rough crop in the scanning stage and refine the final crop in your imaging application. There is a problem with this method, if you include too much white border area then your scans can be influenced by the excess white area. Of course you could select the option to Lock colours on the first tab. VueScan has provided a very accurate cropping tool so you could use this for you final scan.

A lot of cropping options	Central area defined for a selective crop
Bonus white border on final scan	Perfect crop in scanning stage

The options are extensive, I did encounter one problem. When I defined the central picture area the final scan kept producing a white border. Looking down the options I saw I had a 12% border selected, turning this back to 0% produced a full bleed scan. By setting the border to 12% (or other value +/- 20%) the final scan will produce a border - clever stuff.

The Filter tab, this has a few options including Restore Colour and Restore Fading. The restore colour didn't make a lot of difference to my test picture, the Restore fading added a bit more colour to the image. To get the best result these filters should be used with the Colour settings tab, will come to that in a minute. The Grain reduction reduces the amount of grain (noise) in a scan, not the film grain. If you are using a scanner with Digital ICE or FARE, then there will also be an infrared option. Finally the Sharpen is a modest 3x3 sharpening used for printing images. This last option is best left to the Unsharp Mask filter in your imaging application. The sharpening filter is perhaps too much of a half hearted gesture.

The filters tab	Straight scan
With Restore fading	Restore fading and brightness adjustment