B & W scanning with Silverfast SE

[John Bowen]

If you're going to stay with Silverfast you might consider buying the book "SilverFast - The Official Guide" by Taz Tally, about $30 at Amazon (chapter 12 of that book contains an extensive discussion of Silverfast HDR if you're interested).

This must be a really good book. I tried to order a copy through Amazon about a year ago and after about a 4 month wait, Amazon said they couldn't get a copy. Today I see 4 used copies listed on Amazon with prices ranging from $129 - $192...OUCH!!

[dwhistance]

I've just noticed that a German Scanning review/equipment sales site says that they have this book in stock - might be worth trying them? See: http://www.scandig.com/books/english-books/index.html.

David Whistance

[Kirk Gittings]

This must be a really good book. I tried to order a copy through Amazon about a year ago and after about a 4 month wait, Amazon said they couldn't get a copy. Today I see 4 used copies listed on Amazon with prices ranging from $129 - $192...OUCH!!

It is $20 through the Silverfast site and always in stock as far as I know.

[Ted Harris]

FYI, Ted Harris will be doing a scanning workshop at Midwest Photo in Columbus, January 25-27th. I will not be at this one because of knee surgery. Ted and I together will be doing one at the Foto 3 conference in June.

Decided to move the workshop to April, will be one of the last two weekends of the month. We wanted to make sure you had the best ( and worst ) of both of us. As always, the workshop will be strictly limited in participation. We may also be doing a second workshop the same week concentrating on using Imacon and Creo scanners. Stay tuned. Send Kirk or me a PM or email for more info.

[hassiman]

Ted/Kirk,

A webcast scanning seminar would probably draw a LOT of takers... and if you talk to the Lasersoft folks you might even get some sponsorship. They know their documentation is sorely lacking and this might be appealing to them.

Rich
San Diego

[hassiman]

Ted,

WebCast with some product like Adobe Connect which was designed for multiple attendees would be perfect... and you could teach 50-60 at a time or more..... You could also do webcasts using a product like camtasia to capture all screen activity along with audio voice-over and edit right in the program for pod-cast... either way the SilverFast users would flock to you.

Approach Boris Bischof at LaserSoft USA with this idea and I bet he would bite. They realize that they are weak on documentation on this complex process and product.

[mrladewig]

I switched from SE to Ai on my 4990 recently. For many reasons, Ai is well worth the roughly $100 upgrade price.

First off, SE will only allow 16 bit scans for output to HDR, which wasn't a workable solution. Ai allows normal 16 bit output in gray and RGB.

I didn't like SE very well for scanning negatives. In Negafix, it had an auto process that would always stretch the scan to white and black even if your image was intended to be mid tone grays. When you move to Ai, there is an expert control that will allow you to take control of the various color channels when scanning negatives.