I’m in the midst of starting up another major scanning project – a few hundred photos (maybe a thousand) along with some 35mm film, and I checked to make sure that my scanning software of choice (VueScan – link) had been updated, and I noticed that there was a major update earlier this month. Specifically, the ability to colorize black & white photos (and film). That intrigued me, and I began thinking about how important VueScan has been to me, so I thought I’d make it this weekend’s spotlight.
If you’re not familiar with it, VueScan is scanning/digital imaging software that supports, as of the writing of this post, 7759 scanners from 42 manufacturers on the Windows, macOS, and Linux platforms, and it’s adapted to the latest and greatest technologies as time has passed. It gives me far better control over my scanning workflow than any of the manufacturer produced software could ever do. Note: At times, depending on the scanner, I would get copies of SilverFast from Laser Imaging with the scanner (or rather a scaled down version of SF), and it worked just fine, and maybe I’ll cover it in the future.
I started thinking about my scanning software and workflow in general, and realized that here in 2024, there’s not nearly as much discussion about scanning as there was 10, 15, or 20 years ago, because everybody that has a smartphone is carrying a portable scanner in their pocket or purse or backpack.
Scanning software is one of the main parts of my genealogy toolkit, which consists of:
- Genealogy Program/Database
- Scanning Software (VueScan)
- Note-taking Software (Currently Apple Notes and Evernote)
- Google Sheets/Microsoft Excel spreadsheets + AirTable or Microsoft Access (database)
- I use Sheets/Excel for large amounts of data and research logs that maybe don’t fit in my note-taking software easily (because it’s not a spreadsheet that lets me easily sort data) and also for data that is included in my genealogy databases, but that’s also worthy of studying on its own, such as census data.
- Note: I’ve replaced Excel with Google Sheets as it’s free, and available on any of my computers.
- I like the ease of AirTable (my middle-schooler son uses it for a few of his collections and information) but I still have Microsoft Access on my Windows laptop, and on a VM (Windows virtual machine) on my Macs – I know it and can easily use it for what I need when the data is beyond a spreadsheet. My AirTable usage was also bumping into the free limits of what I wanted to do.
- Photo Editing Software (Mac: Pixelmator Pro, Mac/Windows: Affinity Photo, Mac/Windows: Adobe Lightroom)
- Note: I’ve replaced Adobe Photoshop with Affinity Photo, and that’s a story for another time, and worth telling – I was paying too much for Photoshop when I would sometimes skip using it for months at a time. Pixelmator Pro I happened to have picked up for really cheap, and it’s great for quick photo edits that get pushed to family websites (and the images are optimized for the web).
- I should also be incorporating something like Clooz or GenSmarts more often, but I’m struggling with the amount of data I already have.
Yes, there are dedicated iPhone and Android scanning apps which work quite well in making copies of photo prints, as well as the ability to use Apple Notes as a scanner, complete with OCR. Still, for archival purposes I prefer to use a flatbed scanner for prints, and either a flatbed or dedicated film scanner (Plustek is my current) one for film.
Speaking of film, if you’ve been on Amazon or AliBaba or other retail sites, you may have seen a relatively cheap scanner that uses your smartphone to scan actual film and 35mm slides (such as this Kodak-branded scanner for $35 USD – Amazon link). These things pop up in the “daily deals” all the time. Those film scanners….”work” in a pinch, and the ones that fold up are handy for genealogists to have in their laptop bag when they find themselves confronted with copying something, and not having their scanners around, but they are not nearly as good as a dedicated flatbed or film scanner (which can do a far better job of dealing with dust and scratches on the film’s surface).
My History with VueScan
I went back and looked at my receipt, and I purchased the Pro (lifetime) license back in October of 2003, so I’ve been using it for 21 years (and several thousand photos and film/negatives, could have topped 10,000), and in that time, I’ve used it on the following platforms:
- Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 10, and now Windows 11. Yes, I skipped some Windows releases for good reasons, but I used it with those four major releases of Windows.
- Mac OS X 10.3 Panther – macOS 15 Sequoia, which by my count, is 18 major releases of the Mac desktop/laptop operating system.
- PowerPC, Intel and now Arm/Apple Silicon CPU/M2 CPUs.
- FireWire 400 and USB scanners (and I still have an old FireWire scanner, along with a Mac laptop that has a FireWire 400 port).
VueScan has been one of my two constant or “evergreen” programs since I really dove into genealogy research back in the early 2000s (Evernote has been my other). There’s never been a time I didn’t have it installed on my main laptop or desktop.
I’ve used it with over half-a-dozen scanners (different brands – HP, Canon, Epson, Fujitsu, and Plustek) that I owned in the past. I’ve also used it with another half-dozen scanners owned by relatives when I was visiting (made easy thanks to VueScan’s wide support of scanners and not requiring me to carry or download more drivers).
I know that seems a bit excessive, but there was a time where scanner technology was advancing every few years. For me, the biggest leap in the past 8-10 years has been my Epson FastFoto, which is wireless and allows me to batch scan (at high speed) various photos and documents. I would have loved to have had this scanner 15 or 20 years ago when I was lugging around a large flatbed and a couple of external hard drives. Things that took several hours could have been done in under half-an-hour.
And then there is my current collection of digital scanners (in addition to Ye Olde FireWire):
- Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless High-Speed Photo/Doc Scanner (Amazon link)
- Epson V800 Scanner (Amazon link) – (flatbed scanner, no longer produced apparently, replaced by the V600 I guess, insane price these days – up to $1,500)
- Plustek OpticFilm 8200i (Amazon link) – film and slide scanner
I have quite a few third-party adapters for the V800 and Plustek for different film and negative formats, and VueScan has never had any problems with them.
With the exception of the FastFoto, these are older scanners (and the FastFoto is 6 years old!) – it’s a topic for another time, but it feels like general-use scanners have somewhat stagnated (digital cameras can only get so much detail out of a photo print), and in the case of my Plustek, I don’t scan enough film to justify buying a newer one (although I would love to).
For those of you new to scanning, it’s a great time to pick up an older used scanner, and using something like VueScan means you are not beholden to using older software and drivers that may not work well with modern OSes (not to mention tracking down those older scanner programs and drivers, thanks to “link rot”).
Oh the Irony!
On a side note, I have a large NAS (Network Attached Storage) – 20 TB, and yet I’ve scanned almost everything I have long before I put it together. 15 years ago, when I embarked on various scanning projects, I usually ended up having to buy one or more external hard drives, to the point where I had a massive collection of hard drives. Scanning and sorting scans could be a real pain at times if I wasn’t going back by an actual process, and was just scanning to a hard drive with the thought that I would later go back and properly label everything.
Why VueScan?
So why did I choose VueScan all those years ago? Back in 2003, scanner software and drivers could be hit or miss, especially if you were on a Mac (but the Windows software was nothing to write home about). With my first scanner, the software was very buggy and very slow. I had a few genealogists recommend VueScan to me, I bought it, and I have rarely used any other scanning software since 2003. I never purchased SilverFast but as I said, I had multiple copies that came with scanners. I never had access to any of the paid features, but SilverFast is still around and kicking (website) and has its fans.
It worked extremely well with large scans – I would scan older prints from the 1800s as well as certain film and slides in TIFF format, and it was relatively fast (my bottlenecks were usually either the speed of the scanner itself, or writing large TIFF files to a mechanical/spinning hard drive).
It’s been consistent for me over those 21 years. There were times where I changed up various software tools that I was using, and there was a learning curve that set me back/took up time, whereas VueScan was always a constant (this post sounds like a love letter to VueScan, and it’s not meant to be, but it’s been great to me).
What About the Colorization Update?
As for the colorization update, it uses AI to analyze the context of photos and use the most “suitable” colors. You can read more about it here at Hamrick.com, but it’s a part of a trend with VueScan:
In addition to colorization, VueScan also includes features like automatic cropping, automatic media type detection, and automatic hole punch removal—all powered by advanced AI to make scanning easier and more efficient than ever. Best of all, all of this runs locally on your machine, so there’s no need to send your scans to our servers.
It’ll work with black & white slides, film, or (print) photos, but it’s best to use it with high-resolution images. It is a part of the “Professional Edition”, but if you download VueScan at the link below, you can try it out in evaluation mode. If you are an existing user and have updated to the latest version, there is an additional 130MB file you will need to download, a “model” file (see the link), and you will need to do the following:
- Open VueScan and go to the Filter tab.
- Find the
Filter | Colorize
option. - Enable it
A few notes: it’s sensitive to image orientation, and it’s dependent upon your CPU speed (because, as mentioned, it is processed locally on your computer).
The interface is simple, image from Hamrick.com/VueScan:
I don’t have my scanners out and/or attached, but when I do later in the week, I’ll do a follow-up article to this post with samples. In the meantime, you can try it out for yourself at the links below.
Should We Colorize?
I’m old enough to remember the controversy when some black & white movies were colorized, and I understand the criticisms. I’ve also seen some stand-alone and plugin colorization programs that have been released, as well as tools released by genealogy services that do similar image manipulation. My view is that it can breathe new life into old photos, and as long as you make a note that the colorized photo has been colorized, and as long as you keep an original black & white copy around (or sepia as the case maybe).
Recent How-To’s on Hamrick.com:
- Adding additional OCR (Optical Character Recognition) languages:
- https://www.hamrick.com/ocr.html
- Note: Out of the box, or rather the normal download supports English, Spanish, German, French and Italian.
- VueScan uses Google’s Tesseract 5 for later VueScan versions for OCR (it’s very good)
- There are 44 additional languages you can install. Handy for genealogists working with documents/items that have text in languages outside of the five mentioned above.
- How to Scan Photo Albums:
Important Links:
- Main Website: https://www.hamrick.com
- Supported Scanners: https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/supported-scanners.html
- Downloads: https://www.hamrick.com/alternate-versions.html
- VueScan Supporter Program: https://www.hamrick.com/blog/vuescan-supporter-program.html
- This is another way (and easier) for those of us who have lifetime licenses to financially continue supporting the software and its continued development. I believe I paid less than $50 back in 2003, and I’ve gotten far more than that out of it.