Silverfast Se question

[Harley Goldman]

I just picked up an Epson 4990. My 4870 died. I bought the 4990 on the ebay and got a pretty good deal on the non-pro version, so it came with Silverfast Se. I have been using Ai for quite a while with the 4870. Does Se support 16 bit scanning? The 48>24 is available, but the 48 is greyed out. Only the HDR 48 is available, whatever that is. Will I have to upgrade to Ai if I want to scan at 16 bit or I am I missing something obvious?

I ran a couple of quick scans at 8 bit and they look pretty dang good at 100%.The first impression is positive. I will be curious to compare some 4990 scans to the 4870, may it rest in peace.

p.s. I noticed this should be in the software thread, not hardware. If it makes a difference, feel free to move it over there.

[Ed Richards]

16 bit is not an option. If you have SE Plus you can get a 16 bit raw file, but it is a pain to process into an image. See if the Silverfast folks will let you cross license.

[Doug Fisher]

>>I ran a couple of quick scans at 8 bit and they look pretty dang good at 100%.<<

If you can get your scan perfect at the time of the scan and not need to do any curve adjustments during post processing, in theory you should be able to get away with 8/24 bit scanning just fine. 16/48 bit gives you the extra bits which come in handy when you start tweaking curves and such during post processing. I find that I always want/need to do some tweaking though, so 16/48 is kind of a "must" for me.

You should try the 48 bit HDR raw-like option. The resulting scan will be flat but all of the data should be there. It just takes your basic image tweaking to get the image adjusted correctly.

Silverfast does has some sort of program for Ai users so that the software can be used on a second scanner, but if I remember right, it is kind of pricey.

Doug
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www.BetterScanning.com

[Jack Flesher]

Hi Harley: I have the 4990 Pro and use Ai regularly. BUT, I have also played around a bit with Epson's driver for that machine and frankly if you turn on all of the 'advanced' options it is pretty decent software -- and you can get 16/48. The final scan outputs can be almost identical once you figure out the Epson controls, though you do not have all the color management set-up/output options in the Epson suite so you have to convert to your working space in Photoshop.

FWIW,

[false_Aesthetic]

Was I wrong in assuming that 48bit = 16 bit . . . that it's just a difference in uhm . . . naming?


Thanks
T

[Harley Goldman]

You would be correct that 48 bit=16 bit. It is 16 bit in 3 colors yielding 48 bit. They seem to interchangeable.

[Tim Lookingbill]

I second Jack Flesher's comments about Epson Scan's three tool panels. They are pretty powerful once you work with them on several images.

I had to spend quite some time figuring this out, though, sculpting color out of my dull reddish color cast Kodak UC 400 neg previews. I couldn't figure out what was wrong. Tried all sorts of peripheral settings like changing working spaces in the ICM/Colorsync setup, changing gamma in Color Control, scanning RAW and also as a positive to invert/edit in Photoshop all to avoid having to use Epson's tools.

Then it dawned on me I could tweak with all three Epson tool panels open at the same time with an output histogram that updates with the click of a button which you can't do with Photoshop's one tool at a time interface. And if you're working on huge 48bit files it can take a very long time bringing up levels, hue/saturation and curve dialog boxes waiting for Photoshop to update the Histogram/History cache and tiff preview.

The saturation slider works surprisingly well for scanner software. For some reason it produced smoother transitions in intensely colored flower petal detail than applying in PS which injected quite a bit of granular artifacts using the NegPos technique. Now I just get the best preview I can in Epson Scan and do small final tweaks in Photoshop.

Silverfast SE was unusable. Liked the big preview window feature but the previews showed way too many artifacts. Negafix didn't do much good since it didn't have a profile for Kodak UC 400. I got better previews that didn't require as much work with Epson Scan even with the smaller preview window.

[Doug Fisher]

>>with Epson Scan even with the smaller preview window<<

Tim, sorry if this is too basic, but have you experimented with resizing the preview window in EpsonScan by setting it to "large"? Just thought I would mention it in case you had overlooked the option.

Doug
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www.BetterScanning.com

[Tim Lookingbill]

Doug,

Yes, I have maxed out the enlargement capabilities of EpsonScan and have set the Configuration tab to Large.

What's so difficult is creating a marque selection to zoom from that won't overzoom the entire 35mm frame beyond it's borders. It's very kludgy aspect of EpsonScan but I can live with that.

I still can't get as big a size "image preview" enlargement excluding Epson's rather thick window pane bounding borders as I can with Silverfast SE which has simple thin borders. With SE I can drag the corner for an on the fly enlargement to a certain point much like I can with Apple's PictureViewer basic image app. But of course there's also the antialiasing artifacts that go with it as well.

With EpsonScan I still can get really up close clean zooms like say of flower petal detail but it requires editing only that tiny section. I have to scan that tiny section, save as tif and then save the settings with its applied number in the Professional Mode dialog box, zoom back out by going back to preview and apply the settings for the entire frame and rescan. If I save all my tweaks-levels, curves and saturation adjusts before I scan, when I go back to that numbered setting in the drop down menu in Professional Mode, the preview reverts to the previous numbered setting applied to a previous edited frame and I lost all my tweaks for the current one.

Just another quirky thing about EpsonScan that I STILL can live with. Again it took me a while to find this out, though.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[Kirk Gittings]

The saturation slider works surprisingly well for scanner software. For some reason it produced smoother transitions in intensely colored flower petal detail than applying in PS which injected quite a bit of granular artifacts using the NegPos technique.

This often the case because the scanner software has more raw data to work with than PS does further down the flow. The same phenomena holds true for large curve adjustments etc