Epsoncan on Linux is not nice, alternates?

jay moussy · Nov 30, 2023

After using Epsonscan on a Windows system , I installed a current Linux version on a spare system.

It feels like a stripped down version, with, for example, a preview pane lacking key features, compared to Win's

Linux folks, what do you recommend I use, instead of Epsonscan?
I do not need super fancy features, just a comfortable interface to fix B&W scans for home use.

4season · Nov 30, 2023

From your Linux distro's official repository, try installing xsane. This is actually the graphical interface for the SANE libraries, but installing the former will usually grab any other necessary bits.

bfilm · Nov 30, 2023

VueScan is probably the most capable scanning software on Linux, and also a good choice for other operating systems. It is not open-source or free, and the Professional Edition is required for full capability with film scanning, but I think it is likely to work well for you.

As pointed out by another member while I was preparing this post, there is also the SANE API on Linux, with various front-end GUIs available like XSane. This might work for you, but you would have to check if your scanner is well-supported and if it offers the features and capabilities that you want.

Eric Rose · Dec 3, 2023

Wow people are still putting up with Linux! I used it for years but got tired of a lack of "workable" software.

bfilm · Dec 3, 2023

Eric Rose said:
Wow people are still putting up with Linux! I used it for years but got tired of a lack of "workable" software.

I find Linux by far the most preferable system for a desktop workstation computer.

I don't know how recently you have used Linux, but if it has been awhile, then you might be pleased with how capable it is nowadays for image editing and color management.

For everything except photomultiplier tube drum scanners, VueScan is considered by many to be the top choice for scanning software. It is not free and open-source software, but as mentioned above, there is a Linux version.

And programs like GIMP and Scribus are very capable. Both of these programs use Little CMS for color management. ArgyllCMS can also be used for various aspects of color management work, including building custom scanner profiles with IT8 or HCT targets for use with scanning software.

PhilBurton · Dec 3, 2023

Eric Rose said:
Wow people are still putting up with Linux! I used it for years but got tired of a lack of "workable" software.

I used to use UNIX and then Solaris at work. I recently had to install Windows Subsystem for Linux. Ugh, ugh again. Very cumbersome compared with easy-peasy Windows point/click/drag/drop operations.

As for useable software, none of my "daily driver" programs run under Linux. Nuff said.

PhilBurton · Dec 3, 2023

bfilm said:
And programs like GIMP and Scribus are very capable. Both of these programs use Little CMS for color management. ArgyllCMS can also be used for various aspects of color management work, including building custom scanner profiles with IT8 or HCT targets for use with scanning software.

But not Photoshop or Lightroom.

bfilm · Dec 4, 2023

PhilBurton said:
But not Photoshop or Lightroom.

No, but I have yet to find any need for Photoshop over GIMP. Personally, I also dislike subscription software. And while I like free and open-source software, I am not necessarily opposed to commercial software, but prefer traditional perpetual license.

I don't have much interest in Lightroom or any other RAW processing software, but there are darktable and RawTherapee on Linux, which are both very capable programs.

Of course, people will have their software preferences--maybe things that don't run on Linux--but there are good quality software options for most needs nowadays on Linux.

koraks · Dec 4, 2023

bfilm said:
I have yet to find any need for Photoshop over GIMP.

Photoshop has:
* Dynamic adjustment layers
* CMYK color space
* Channel separations with user-adjustable channels (e.g. for spot colors)
* 'Live' sampling tools for color matching (place pipette in image and get a live readout as you twist curves etc)
* PostScript awareness
GIMP has none of that and no usable substitutes for them, either.
I have no/little interest in content-aware/AI-assisted fill, heal & expansion, but Adobe is way ahead in that area as well.

Then there's the user interface issue with Adobe's UI just being more streamlined, intuitive and effective.

Just a couple of things that come to mind as a daily user of GIMP. GIMP is really nice, don't get me wrong, but it seems it'll always keep dragging several years behind Adobe.

It's been ages since I attempted scanning under Linux; back when I did, Sane was in its infancy and support for film scanners was basically absent. I think I got my 4990 flatbed to scan reflective media (with very, very rudimentary scan settings), but no way it would engage the transparency unit. My Minolta scanner remained totally unrecognized by the software altogether. Hopefully all this has changed by now...

bfilm · Dec 4, 2023

koraks said:
Photoshop has:
* Dynamic adjustment layers
* CMYK color space
* Channel separations with user-adjustable channels (e.g. for spot colors)
* 'Live' sampling tools for color matching (place pipette in image and get a live readout as you twist curves etc)
* PostScript awareness
GIMP has none of that and no usable substitutes for them, either.
I have no/little interest in content-aware/AI-assisted fill, heal & expansion, but Adobe is way ahead in that area as well.

Well, like I said, I have not found any need for Photoshop over GIMP. It will depend upon your needs. Adjustment layers would be nice. Krita has filter layers which are like adjustment layers. Krita also has CMYK capability and perhaps the other things you mention. In addition to its purpose as a digital painting program, Krita is a very good photographic editing program, but I have found it to be less stable than GIMP in use--but maybe it was an isolated or temporary problem.

I don't really see the need for working in CMYK with photographs in an image editor, unless perhaps you are working on legacy files like scans originally done in CMYK. Otherwise, in a color-managed workflow, pretty much everything can be done better and more easily in RGB (link leads to a PDF), and then you can convert to CMYK in Scribus or Krita for printing.

koraks said:
Then there's the user interface issue with Adobe's UI just being more streamlined, intuitive and effective.

This is purely subjective.

koraks said:
Just a couple of things that come to mind as a daily user of GIMP. GIMP is really nice, don't get me wrong, but it seems it'll always keep dragging several years behind Adobe.

Maybe, but as mentioned, this might be of no consequence depending upon one's needs.

koraks said:
It's been ages since I attempted scanning under Linux; back when I did, Sane was in its infancy and support for film scanners was basically absent. I think I got my 4990 flatbed to scan reflective media (with very, very rudimentary scan settings), but no way it would engage the transparency unit. My Minolta scanner remained totally unrecognized by the software altogether. Hopefully all this has changed by now...

I don't have much experience with SANE. It looks like there is support for many film scanners now, but I get the impression that some of the backends have more development activity than others. But I know some people have it work well for them.

koraks · Dec 4, 2023

bfilm said:
I don't really see the need for working in CMYK with photographs in an image editor

As you said, it really depends on what you do with it.
I bumped into the limitations of GIMP pretty hard when trying to do color separations for alt. process printing. The same with trying to leverage PS capability of a printer to coax halftone screen negatives from it.

For most of the digital-domain image editing, GIMP is fine. The lack of dynamic adjustment layers is a nuisance, but can be lived with by just duplicating layers a lot. It's inefficient and never quite as convenient as the Adobe way, but for simple edits, it's good enough.

bfilm said:
This is purely subjective.

Yes, it seems so. Still, I wonder what would come of an experiment where you put 10 people behind GIMP and an equal number behind Photoshop, have them train on the software for a week, and then see how productive they are in a real world setting. Having used Photoshop for years and GIMP, too, sometimes in parallel, my preference, subjective or not, has proven to be enduring throughout consecutive versions of both platforms.

bfilm · Dec 4, 2023

koraks said:
As you said, it really depends on what you do with it.
I bumped into the limitations of GIMP pretty hard when trying to do color separations for alt. process printing. The same with trying to leverage PS capability of a printer to coax halftone screen negatives from it.

Yes, I was thinking mainly of the desktop publishing workflow of photograph preparation for gravure or offset printing. By the way, with this in mind, GIMP can preview RGB images for CMYK printing with the soft-proofing capabilities of its color management system. Currently, you have to be in perceptual gamma (sRGB) channel encoding instead of linear light for soft-proofing to work properly. But I think this should work pretty well for any image in a working space of sRGB or a working space with a gamma of 2.2 like AdobeRGB, DonRGB4, and Ekta Space PS 5. sRGB and the gamma 2.2 working spaces are "approximately perceptually uniform and approximately equal to each other" in channel encoding.

GLS · Dec 4, 2023

koraks said:
Photoshop has:
* Dynamic adjustment layers
* CMYK color space
* Channel separations with user-adjustable channels (e.g. for spot colors)
* 'Live' sampling tools for color matching (place pipette in image and get a live readout as you twist curves etc)
* PostScript awareness
GIMP has none of that and no usable substitutes for them, either.
I have no/little interest in content-aware/AI-assisted fill, heal & expansion, but Adobe is way ahead in that area as well.

Then there's the user interface issue with Adobe's UI just being more streamlined, intuitive and effective.

And this is before you even touch on all the third party plugins and filters available for PS.

koraks · Dec 4, 2023

bfilm said:
By the way, with this in mind, GIMP can preview RGB images for CMYK printing with the soft-proofing capabilities of its color management system.

Yes, I use this function frequently. It's one of the areas in which GIMP has improved significantly over the years. Its soft-proofing capabilities are effective. However, this is unrelated to the ability to make separations etc.

GLS said:
And this is before you even touch on all the third party plugins and filters available for PS.

That, too. While GIMP apparently has a very usable plugin interface (script fu), the ecosystem of PS-plugins is evidently far bigger.

bfilm · Dec 4, 2023

koraks said:
Yes, I use this function frequently. It's one of the areas in which GIMP has improved significantly over the years. Its soft-proofing capabilities are effective. However, this is unrelated to the ability to make separations etc.

Right, that is why I mentioned how I had been thinking about CMYK in regard to desktop publishing. For this, there is no need to make separations in the image editing software. The CMYK conversion will happen in the desktop publishing software or at the printer. But the soft-proofing might be useful to get an idea of if the image is in the range you are expecting.

MattKing · Dec 4, 2023

For those looking for Linux options, Corel's Aftershot Pro is available for Linux and Windows - with a single license - and provides a reasonable alternative for Lightroom.

koraks · Dec 4, 2023

bfilm said:
The CMYK conversion will happen in the desktop publishing software or at the printer.

That's the common way to do it in a desktop situation, yes.
It's different when you're actually printing spot colors; there are obviously color RIPs for this in the printing industry, but Photoshop can do it in a pinch, too, which can probably save tens of thousands of dollars in a highly specific software license if you want to explore, say, CMYK gum or carbon transfer. Unfortunately, GIMP only has rudimentary functionality in this area; there's a separations plugin that can do CMY and CMYK, but it's not configurable and the most crucial functions are not configurable.
My application is/was a rather arcane one, but I have to be honest in that over the years, I've bumped my head over and over again on the limitations of GIMP. I still use it and it's evidently great value (free, after all!), though.

bfilm · Dec 4, 2023

koraks said:
My application is/was a rather arcane one

Yes, I think much of this is going way beyond what the usual photography and desktop publishing workflow would need. There might be processes where particular pieces of software might only be available on other operating systems, but my initial point was that for most work, there are very good options now on Linux. People might prefer the interface or certain functions of software on other operating systems, but for the most part there is software to get the job done on Linux. One might also find a certain satisfaction in working with, and possibly supporting, free and open-source software.

bfilm · Dec 4, 2023

koraks said:
That's the common way to do it in a desktop situation, yes.
It's different when you're actually printing spot colors; there are obviously color RIPs for this in the printing industry, but Photoshop can do it in a pinch, too, which can probably save tens of thousands of dollars in a highly specific software license if you want to explore, say, CMYK gum or carbon transfer. Unfortunately, GIMP only has rudimentary functionality in this area; there's a separations plugin that can do CMY and CMYK, but it's not configurable and the most crucial functions are not configurable.
My application is/was a rather arcane one, but I have to be honest in that over the years, I've bumped my head over and over again on the limitations of GIMP. I still use it and it's evidently great value (free, after all!), though.

You might not have much interest in exploring another program, but I wonder if Krita could do what you want here. I know it has more capability with CMYK than GIMP currently does, but I haven't explored these areas of it to know the various things it can do.

koraks · Dec 4, 2023

Thanks for the tip, I'll look into it!
I ran Linux on my desktop for years; it was OK, but for work I preferred MS Office over Open/LibreOffice. I ended up spending much more time on maintenance and software upgrade tasks than with Windows, so at some point I went back to MS which generally is a trouble-free experience for me. I still run a Linux server for some odd jobs around the house though. Works great for that.

bfilm · Dec 4, 2023

It looks like adjustment layers could be coming soon to GIMP. Maybe next year in the 3.0.0 release or shortly afterwards. Krita has the equivalent of adjustment layers, that they call filter layers. It looks like GIMP is referring to them as layer effects, and sometimes as layer filters.

Finale countdown to GIMP 3 (see the comments)

GIMP Developer - Layer effects UI

One of the GIMP developers: "It's going to be my main focus until then. [ZeMarmot] has been encouraging me on it for 3.0. Even layer-only effects would be great because it would make a lot of the color tools like brightness/contrast non-destructive, which would really be helpful to people."

koraks · Dec 4, 2023

That would be a major improvement, and very welcome indeed!

bfilm · Dec 4, 2023

If anyone has any need for desktop publishing software on Linux (or other operating systems), I recommend Scribus. It has always been very stable and solid for me, and the way you can accomplish things in it always makes me smile. When you are new to the program it can be a bit of a mystery, but once you figure out how things work, it is great. Use the Devel(opment) version 1.5.8 if you want to use it. Despite its name, it is very stable.

koraks · Dec 5, 2023

Yeah, Scribus is nice. Used it for a book cover recently. It seems quite capable.

benveniste · Dec 5, 2023

Eric Rose said:
Wow people are still putting up with Linux! I used it for years but got tired of a lack of "workable" software.

And once again, all of Photrio was plunged into war. I have a 4-port KVM which currently has 3 machines attached. One runs Windows, one runs Linux, and one runs MacOS, so I'll just sit here on the sidelines and munch popcorn.

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