Vuescan hangs on Calibrate with MacOS Catalina probably due to Grain Dissolver

I had this problem a few years ago Sierra, but Vuescan, an image scanner, hangs on calibrate and results are wrong.

I never did get to the bottom of it and just switched to USB from Firewire, but how it is back. I think it is probably some bad parameters, so how to reset Vuescan on the Mac?

The help is well not too helpful. Basically try a bunch of different USB ports. The basics advice to set to default options. The problem is that it asks to calibrate and you can never just do the default and it hangs on the title screen.

But it looks like on a Mac, in ~/Pictures/vuescan is both the vuescan.ini and a vuescan.log file.

It sure feels like a drive hang, so I submitted a bug report and then changed the name of the vuescan.ini file and this seemed to work.

In experimenting some more, the issue seems to be Grain Dissolver. This is a special feature of the DiImage that puts a translucent material in front of the light to get a more diffuse image. If I set that, then some time later, you get skipped scan lines. In talking with the Vuescan folks, they suggest changing the USB cable and switching to a true USB 2.0 port.

But I’m finding that for this case, it seems software related. The DiImage is an obsolete scanner, so I’m sure there is just a driver bug.

Also a quick now on dealing with Black & White images, I posted before, but the tricks are:

  1. Makes sure to select B&W Negatives
  2. Also make sure that you have selected black and white JPEG so that it is much smaller.
  3. Finally, you can select TMAX-400 or something like that. I have been using Tri-X film and this doesn’t seem that great. if you click on Restore fading, it does seem better.

I’m Rich & Co.

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