The Colour tab

The Colour tab is perhaps the most involved of all the tabs. I am staying in the Advanced mode., which gives access to a plethora of options. The screen shot on the left is the options you will get, but if you select the Lock colour in the first tab then the Color tab options will be those displayed on the right. If all this sounds complicated, then perhaps it is more complex than it need be, but the end result will more than justify any learning curve.

Advanced mode options	Advanced mode with Lock image colour selected

At the beginning of this review I said "The interface was totally alien to me, where are the colour correction sliders, curves, Hue Saturation Levels etc." Well, the controls are there, perhaps not what I had expected, but never the less they are there buried within little sliders. This software hasn't got lots of pretty coloured icons, it has sufficient controls to let you get on with the task of colour correcting the image to give you the best possible quality. The numeric values increase or decrease in 0.01 increments for precise control. Once you have arrived at a desired setting you can save the values via the top menu strip, or load a previous setting.

At the top of the list (left screen shot) there is a drop down list with various preset colour balance options, these include; Manual, Neutral, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Night, Auto Levels, White Balance, Landscape, Portrait and None. It is well worth trying one of these settings before you try anything else, the results are generally near spot on. Images can be further tweaked via the sliders to produce the desired colour. Applying a colour space to any scan is very easy, just select one from the drop down list, Output, Monitor, Printer.

Colour tab	Predefined options
Kodak reference file	Scan of print

The colour accuracy of print scans is almost spot on. I used the Kodak - Colour Confidence, colour management check up kit to see how close the scans came. The grocery lady scan is nearly spot on, any deviation is partially a result of slight miss match of the Kodak print to the Tiff file and of course a deviation in scanning. A nice feature is that you can set the colour balance by right clicking on a neutral grey area, or double click on the area to set an Automatic white balance.

I would have liked a saturation command, but this is not a major point as most users will want to make some corrections from within their imaging application. The main point is that VueScan will faithfully capture the image colours.