Prefs Tab

VueScan Screenshot - Prefs Tab

This tab lets you set preferences that control the behavior of VueScan.

Prefs | Language

Use this option to set the language to use in VueScan.

Basic Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Thumbnail type

Use this option to set what type of thumbnails are displayed on the right side of the window.

If ‘Off’, page thumbnails aren’t displayed.

If ‘Auto’, either thumbnails of multiple frames are displayed (if more than one frame) or thumbnails of multi-page PDF, TIFF or JPEG files. The most recently modified of the preview/scan or multi-page file is selected.

If ‘PDF file’, thumbnails of multi-page PDF files are displayed.

If ‘TIFF file’, thumbnails of multi-page TIFF files are displayed.

If ‘JPEG file’, thumbnails of multi-page JPEG files are displayed.

If ‘Cropped area’ and if multiple frames, thumbnails of the cropped area of each frame are displayed. Clicking on a thumbnail changes Input | Frame number and changing the frame number changes the selected thumbnail..

If you’ve clicked on a thumbnail, press the space bar to display a Quick View of this thumbnail. Press the space bar again to dismiss this. The arrow keys let you change the thumbnail - up and down change the selected thumbnail, left and right display and dismiss the Quick View. Hold the shift key while moving up and down with the arrow keys to select multiple thumbnails.

If thumbnails of multi-page files are displayed, the Delete key deletes the selected page.

You can click on a thumbnail with the right mouse button to see what options are available for this type of thumbnail.

Standard Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Font size (pt)

Use this option to set the font size to use in VueScan. The font size is specified in points, which are about the height of characters in pixels (varies a bit by operating system and type of display).

Standard Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Crop units

Use this option to choose the units in the Crop tab. You can choose pixel, mm, cm, inch, pica or point.

This setting does not affect the size of output.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Printed units

Use this option to select the units when displaying the printed width and height. You can choose pixel, mm, cm, inch, pica or point.

This also affects the units displayed in the status area at the bottom of the VueScan window.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | External viewer

Setting this option starts a program to display the image when the scan completes.

On Windows and Mac OS X, this is the same program that starts up when you double-click on the file. On Linux, this uses xdg-open to view the file.

You can change which viewer is used with the Prefs | Viewer option.

Basic Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Viewer

This option specifies how to view an image when the “View” button is pressed or at the end of a scan (when Prefs | External viewer is set).

Set this option to “default” to use the default viewer for images on your system. This is normally the viewer that starts up when you double-click on a file.

Set this option to “folder” to have the folder containing the image opened.

On Windows, if the viewer name is “default”, the file association for this type of file will be used. You can also put command-line options after the name of the viewer (e.g. “vuepro32 /fillwindow” to display images without a window frame with VuePrint). If the name of the viewer has “%1” after it (e.g. vuepro32 “%1”), the file name will be substituted at that point. If you use the %1 argument on the command line, be sure to put double-quotes around it, otherwise file names that have embedded spaces won’t work.

On Mac OS X, if the viewer name is “default”, the images will be displayed by the same application that would start if you double-click on the files. Normally, Preview.app is used as the viewer.

On Mac OS X, you can set up the default viewer for a type of file by clicking on an image, choosing “File | Show info”, choosing “Open with application”, selecting an application, and then choosing “Change all”.

On Linux, if the viewer name is “default”, xdg-open is used to view images.

On Linux, the viewer name can have command-line options after it, and the file name will be appended to the end of the command-line before it’s run, after adding double-quotes around the file name.

Standard Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Browser

On Linux, this option is used if you want to use a web browser other than mozilla to display html files.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed (Linux only).

Prefs | Dark mode

On Windows 10, this option is used if you want to change the screen to a dark mode theme, which sometimes is better when scanning film.

You can also set this by choosing the ‘VueScan Dark Mode’ theme in the Personalization control panel.

Standard Option: This option is always displayed (Windows 10 only).

Prefs | Auto load options

When set to “Auto” or “On”, the options settings from the last time you ran VueScan are loaded automatically and are saved in vuescan.ini when VueScan exits. When set to “Off”, vuescan.ini is deleted on exit, and the the default options values of all options are used on startup.

When set to Auto, all options are loaded except some common temporary options settings of Input | Task, Crop | Crop size and Crop | Auto offset.

A common problem with VueScan is accidentally setting an option to an unwanted value, and then not knowing how to reset it back to the correct option.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Graph type

This option is used to control the type of graph that’s displayed underneath the Options panel.

If you choose “Raw”, a histogram of the raw data from the scanner is displayed, including the infrared channel if available.

If you choose “B/W”, a histogram of the image prior to applying the black/white points is displayed, and you can change the black/white points with small triangles under the histogram.

If you choose “Curve”, a curve is displayed that is applied after the black/white points and before the gamma correction (and the “Color | Brightness” option is just a gamma multiplier). You can adjust the curve by moving the small triangles under the histogram.

If you choose “Image”, a histogram of the displayed image is shown.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Button 1/2/3/4 action

Use these options to control what VueScan does when you press a button on the front of a scanner. The default values of these options disable the buttons.

Professional Option: This option is displayed when the scanner has buttons that can be read.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Display raw scan

Use this option to display the raw scan data during a scan. You might want to turn this option off if you have a slow processor or don’t want to see the scan in progress.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Display positive

Use this option to display the raw scan data for negative film in positive format. This isn’t an accurate negative to positive conversion, but is intended to give a rough idea of what the image will look like.

Professional Option: This option is displayed when scanning negative film.

Prefs | Splash screen

Use this option to display the splash screen when VueScan starts up.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Histogram type

Use this option to specify whether the Y axis of histograms is the number of samples (linear), the square root of the number of samples, or the logarithm of the number of samples. The default is “Linear”.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Add extensions

This option controls whether the TIFF, JPEG, PDF, Text and Index file names automatically have a “.tif”, “.jpg”, “.pdf”, “.txt” or “.bmp” extension added to the file name. This reduces the amount of typing needed when manually setting the saved file names. No file extension will be added if the file name has a period in it. This option is set by default.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Substitute date

This option controls whether the TIFF, JPEG, PDF and Text file names can include the scan date and time in the file name.

For instance, if the file name is “@.jpg”, the resulting file will be “Scan-YYYY-MM-DD-0001+.jpg” with YYYY substitured for the current year, MM for the current month and DD for the current day.

Additionally, you can use YYYY for the 4-digit year, YY for the two-digit year, MM, DD, HH, II, and SS for the month, day, hour, minute and second when the scan was started.

You need to have at least three date/time names for this to work. For instance, a file name of MMDD.tif won’t be substituted, but a file name of MMDDHH.tif will be.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Warn on overwrite

When enabled, VueScan will display a warning message before overwriting a TIFF, JPEG, PDF or OCR text file, and allow you to prevent the file from being overwritten. This option is set by default.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Warn on not ready

When enabled, VueScan will display a warning message when the scanner isn’t ready (or the raw scan file doesn’t exist) and you press the Preview or Scan button.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Warn on no scanner

When enabled, VueScan will display a warning message when a scanner is not connected.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Exit when done

Enabling this option causes VueScan to exit when scanning completes.

This option is not set by default.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Beep when done

Enabling this option causes a sound to be played on the computer’s speakers when scanning completes. This is sometimes useful to alert you at the end of a long- running scan. On Windows, this is the “Default sound” in the “Sounds and Multimedia” control panel. On Linux and Mac OS X, this is a simple beep.

This option is not set by default.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Beep when auto eject

Enabling this option causes a sound to be played on the computer’s speakers when auto ejecting.

This is sometimes useful to alert you at the end of a long- running preview or scan. On Windows, this is the “Default sound” in the “Sounds and Multimedia” control panel. On Linux and Mac OS X, this is a simple beep.

This option is not set by default.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Use temp file name

When TIFF, JPEG or PDF files are being written, but haven’t yet been closed, this option instructs VueScan to use file names with a .tmp at the end. When the file is closed, the file is renamed to remove the .tmp.

This allows programs that monitor a directory for files to know when the TIFF, JPEG or PDF files are ready for further processing.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Anti alias text

Controls whether 1-bit images (i.e. text) are displayed with anti-aliasing. This results in smoother looking displays but also takes a bit more computing power.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Anti alias image

Controls whether gray-scale and color images are displayed with anti-aliasing. This results in smoother looking displays but also takes a bit more computing power.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Enable density display

Enables displaying the image density when the cursor is moved over the image with the control key held down.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Enable raw from disk

Enables the Output | Raw file option when scanning from disk. This is useful if you want to re-scan raw scan files at a lower resolution or bits per pixel and save a raw scan file with these changes.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Enable TIFF thumbnails

When this option is enabled, TIFF files have a small preview embedded in them. This makes displaying thumbnails of these files much faster, since only the small thumbnail needs to be read, not the whole image. When the image is larger than 10 MBytes, this is significantly faster.

These thumbnails are only embedded when the image is wider or taller than 2048 pixels and when the image has 8 or more bits per pixel.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Disable scanners

Use this option to disable some kinds of (or all) scanners. This option isn’t used by default.

This is useful if you want to run multiple copies of VueScan at the same time, scanning with one copy and processing raw disk files with another. To use this option, put copies of VueScan in different directories, run VueScan, set this option to ‘All scanners’, then exit and restart VueScan.

You can also use this option if a vendor-provided plugin library is crashing - disable plugins from this vendor.

VueScan uses the video device interface for some types of low-cost film scanners, but this also sometimes detects webcams instead of these low-cost film scanners. Set this option to ‘Webcams’ to disable this.

VueScan uses mDNS to search the network for available scanners. If you’re in a large office with many network-accessible scanners, this can be inconvenient. Set this option to ‘Network scanners’ to disable this.

Standard Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Network scanners

VueScan normally uses the mDNS protocol to search for scanners on the local network. However, sometimes scanners are on a separate subnet and sometimes the mDNS protocol (UDP port 5353) is blocked on a network by anti-virus software, firewalls or routers.

VueScan also uses a Canon device discovery protocol to search for Canon scanners on the local network. Make sure you aren’t blocking UDP port 8610 or 8612 in firewalls.

To manually configure a network scanner, you need the IP address of the scanner.

When this option is set to eSCL, you also need to specify the TCP port, either 80 or 8080.

When this option is set to Manual, you also need the USB Vendor ID and USB Product ID of the scanner to identify what kind of scanner it is (so VueScan knows what kind of commands to send over the network). You can get this at:

  https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/supported-scanners.html

Then set this option to “Manual” and fill in the IP address, Vendor ID and Product ID below.

Then use the “Scanner | Find scanners” command to get VueScan to use this scanner.

Standard Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | IP address

The IP address of a scanner looks like four decimal numbers, separated by periods, like nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn. You can get this from your network administrator.

Standard Option: This option displayed when “Prefs | Network scanners” is set to “eSCL” or “Manual”.

Prefs | TCP port

The TCP port used by an eSCL scanner is either 80 or 8080. HP scanners usually use 8080 and other scanners usually use 80.

Standard Option: This option displayed when “Prefs | Network scanners” is set to “eSCL”.

Prefs | USB Vendor ID

The USB Vendor ID of a scanner is a 4-digit hexadecimal number. For instance, the USB Vendor ID for Epson is 04b8. You can get this at:

  https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/supported-scanners.html

VueScan needs this information to know what kinds of commands the scanner uses.

Standard Option: This option displayed when “Prefs | Network scanners” is set to “Manual”.

Prefs | USB Product ID

The USB Product ID of a scanner is a 4-digit hexadecimal number. For instance, the USB Product ID for an Epson DS-780N is 0164. You can get this info at:

  https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/supported-scanners.html

VueScan needs this information to know what kinds of commands the scanner uses.

Standard Option: This option displayed when “Prefs | Network scanners” is set to “Manual”.

Prefs | Enable sliders/spin buttons

You can use this option to remove the slider and spin button controls. This is sometimes useful if you want the Options panel to be quite small to maximize the image display area. This option is set by default.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Enable popup tips

You can use this option to enable a short description that pops up in a small yellow box when the mouse hovers over options and buttons.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Calibration period

You can use this option to set the maximum number of days to use a scanner calibration. A scanner’s lamp color and lamp uniformity can shift over time, so it’s sometimes useful to re-do the “Scanner | Calibrate” command to compensate for this. This is only used by some types of scanners.

Professional Option: This option is displayed when the scanner is capable of calibration.

Prefs | Window maximized/iconized x/y offset/size

Use these options to set the VueScan window position and size.

Professional Option: This option is always displayed.

Prefs | Signature

This signature is added to the right side of captions.

Professional Option: This option is displayed when at least one of the output files is enabled.

Prefs | Send preview data

When activated, this option will send a copy of Preview that you make to the VueScan team. We use this data to train our image processing algorithms to better implement features like automatic cropping. You can read more about this option here

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