Please recommend software for scanning old photos!

September 28, 2017 5:46 PM

Please recommend software for photo / negative scanning and correction. I have a flatbed scanner (Epson perfection V370 photo). I have a good PC. I need the SOFTWARE - and I'm losing my mind. Piccasa is gone and I need something where I can scan, correct, and save.

I AM WILLING TO SPEND GOOD MONEY!
I want to scan photos and negatives natively, correct them (both crop/tilt and also deal with the negatives) and save them locally.

posted by Baby_Balrog to Technology (7 answers total)

Response by poster: The bundled EpsonScan and also ScanSpeeder are awful and can't do the job. They can catch the image but it's madness to try to export it from there.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 5:47 PM on September 28, 2017

Vuescan would be my recommendation. It does everything and works with pretty much every scanner out there.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:53 PM on September 28, 2017 [3 favorites]

Well, Photoshop plus Lightroom runs ten bucks a month these days. They will certainly handle all your editing and organizational needs, though the learning curve is a bit steep if you are totally new to them.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:03 PM on September 28, 2017

Vuescan is really the only solid 3rd party option. It’s not free, but I’ll have to switch to it when the last of my G4 Macs dies & I can’t run the native Nikon canoscan software any more. I’ve done a lot of looking preparing for the day, & it really does seem to have the best feature set & interface out there. And yeah, get Lightroom to fine-tune, organize & publish your pics once they’re scanned. Non-destructive editing is where it’s at!
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:01 PM on September 28, 2017

You can still find the install files for Picasa here. I use it on a Windows 10 machine and it works.
posted by soelo at 7:25 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Just chiming in as another person still happily using Picasa (on Windows 7). Its retouching tools are easy to use and may be adequate for your needs. I'm expert in Photoshop but would hardly ever use it for retouching scans as it'd take so much longer than using Picasa. But it depends on what you're scanning and what you plan to do with it.

Bear in mind with Picasa the original file on disk isn't altered until you "export" it – until then Picasa just remembers the edits in an invisible config file.

I just use the scanner's driver software for scanning, invoked via Irfanview. (Not the apps bundled with my Canon scanner.) Vuescan, as suggested, is probably a better option.
posted by snarfois at 3:21 AM on September 29, 2017

I've been pretty happy just using the Epson software in Professional Mode to scan photos and negatives. I usually scan at 3200 DPI resolution and save to a .tiff format and then fix color, tone, contrast and dust/scratches in photoshop.
posted by octothorpe at 8:18 AM on September 29, 2017