[sane-devel] Help with deciding which frontend to use please

[cl at isbd.net]

On Thu, Nov 09, 2006 at 09:07:06AM +0000, Jon Chambers wrote:
> 
> Hi Chris,
> 
> On Thu, 9 Nov 2006, cl at isbd.net wrote:
> >[...]
> >When you say "process your images" what do you mean?  Isn't removing
> >colour casts that?  If it is are you saying that it will be easier in
> >the Gimp?  I'm not aiming to do any serious cropping or major work on
> >the slides, I just want to preserve what there is and remove major
> >colour casts etc.
> 
> WHen I say "process your images" I mean do whatever kind of colour 
> filtering that you need to restore your slides.  I haven't tried this (I'm 
> colourblind so I tend not to mess with the colour operations of the 
> Gimp!).  If you have many slides to scan & process then one of the key 
> benefits of the Gimp is that operations can be scripted (natively with 
> the script-fu stuff or else there are plugins for other languages, eg: 
> perl).  This means:
> 
> 1. Someone may already have written the filter that you need.
> 2. You have the option to bite the bullet, plough through the Gimp manual, 
> and write the script yourself.  There's an upfront time cost but it'll be 
> worth it if you have hundreds of slides.
> 
Thanks for the explanation and insight into what the Gimp can do, I've
only rarely used it and haven't explored it seriously at all.

However I don't think it necessarily means that the Gimp has a big
advantage as:-

    The colour casts I'm dealing with are not all that consistent,
    there is usually at the very most just one film with a given
    colour cast and that can be just ten or twelve slides.

    Some (many?) of the scanner front-ends allow you to save a
    'profile' which is essentially a collection of settings for
    handling a particular film type (or whatever). Certainly vuescan
    can do this and I'm pretty sure xsane can too.

-- 
Chris Green (chris at halon.org.uk)