In my experience, if you are going to scan color negs, e.g. Portra, then the full version of Silverfast beats anything else, including Vuescan and Epson Scan.
In my experience, if you are going to scan color negs, e.g. Portra, then the full version of Silverfast beats anything else, including Vuescan and Epson Scan.
I have many 5 x 7 inch black and white negatives to scan and I don't know if Silverfast would help there. I am actually having fairly good luck with Epson and Vuescan. I did scan in several 35 mm negatives and was very impressed with Silverfast. I got to get these 5 x 7's done asap as they are on loan for a very short time. Will be interesting to learn about Silverfast.
Might I ask what kind of scanner you use?
Thanks
Smorton
Very rarely... Is the Negative ever a "Perfect File".
Long before the invention of Adobe Photoshop... I think that AA perhaps had the 'Correct' idea?
"The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways."
“You don't take a photograph, you make it.”
~~ Ansel Adams. ~~
Well, sometimes the negative isn't quite perfect. Even contact printers occasionally resort to some modifications although if I were contact printing it's probably fair to say that I'd make sure the negs were more almost perfect.
The biggest problem with Silverfast SE, in my opinion, is that it doesn't allow you to scan in 16 bit per channel mode. I think Silverfast's pricing model is ridiculous, but unfortunately, if you want 16 bits per channel, you can't avoid upgrading to Ai.
That's incorrect.
SilverFast SE will allow you to scan in 16bit/ch and export to TIFF or DNG. The serious limitation is that you can't scan a negative and have it use NegaFix to invert and color/tone correct the negative into a positive while in 16bit/ch mode. You have to upgrade to SilverFast Ai Studio to be able to output 16bit/ch from a negative that's been properly inverted to a positive.
I brought that up in post #6
In traditional wet printing the paper imparts its inherent S-curve to the negative's S-curve for the tonality we are familiar with in B&W prints. A scanner can output a linear scale of tones in the negative, which makes it look flat and dull. But that's okay, we're not done yet. Photoshop, or other software tools, imparts an S-curve to the negative in a similar way print paper does, and completes the image process cycle for the right tonality we want. I don't trust my scanners to arrange the negative's tones as well as with Photoshop, or Aperture, or Lightroom.
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