Simple autocorrection and iSRD

[pianomcl]

I am an 80-year-old newbie with thousands of Kodachrome slides of foreign travel that I wish to archive using a Plustek OpticFilm 7200 iSRD with Silverfast 6.5. Please tell me how to set Silverfast so that it will do adequate color adjustment and scratch removal as quickly as possible with the minimum of effort on my part. If some slides need adjusting my husband can do that later: he is fairly skilled in using Photoshop on his computer - but even he is bewildered by the complexity of the Silverfast Manual.Lily

[LSI_Heidorn]

Dear Lily,
while the thoughts and decisions to make when choosing an archival formats are certainly complex, i try to sketch a "known working" setting for you:

-1- The basis
To be sure that we are starting with the correct setting, please do a full reset. ( hold shift when pressing reset or use the trashcan icon left to the preview until SilverFast asks if you want to clear the preview and reset all ).
Switch to the "general" tab and select "Kodachrome" type of images to have a correct color correction caring for the specialties of the kodachrome emulsion.
If there is no such thing you may not have installed the latest version of SilverFast for your scanner. Please do so !

-1- The Resolution.
As Kodachrome Images are normally taken by good cameras and by skilled photographers and consist of a superior material i would advice to use the limits of the scanner.
So please choose 3600 dpi by using the Resoluton slider.

-2- The color depth:
There are two ways: correcting the images before scanning in full resolution and thus saving cost and time of opening the image afterwards ( e.g. in SIlverFast HDR ) and post-adjusting the image...
OR
Wanting to make the scanning process as mechanical or automatic as possible, beeing willing to work on the pictures afterwards.
For your task i would suggest to have the images corrected before scanning them in full res, so we can choose a lesser colordeoth that is not needed if the image is not going to be changed afterwards drastically.
So please choose the default of 48 -> 24 Bit color

-3- Sharpness
I am sorry but this is so very subjective that you have to give it a try !
First use the "Automatic Sharpness" from the filter menu, if images seem to sharp, choose a lesser auto sharpness, if its not sharp enough, choose a higher auto Sharpness preset.
Please note that those images may tend to look a tad unsharp as the Plustek is a fine scanner but nevertheless he cannot get every detail from a great film such as kodachrome.
There is a reason that you can also spend $10000 for a scanner !!

-4- Output File format:
Desirable formats for your task would be TIFF format or JPG format.
While JPG offers the advantage of much less file size, TIFF offers unmatched ( as it is uncompressed ) Quality.
I would suggest JPG if we assume that you do not want to work ( in terms of color correction ) too hard on the images afterwards ( same decision as in -2- ).
So please choose JPG but may use the option in the "save" dialog to increase the quality a bit from the default setting leaving enough quality to do some post processing if you wish to do so.

-5- iSRD aka Infrared guided "Smart Removal of Defects"
You should simply switch it on by clicking on the iSRD button, turning it from grayish to a colored icon ( left to the preview, somewhere in the middle). If you click it one more time a second button would appear below, allowing to adjust the settings which is somehow more complicated.
This should eliminate a lot of the dust particles, however nothing can replace a good "once over" with a suitable piece of cloth or pressured air can, try to prepare the images as good as possible.

-6- Color Correction & how to do it.
If you use the settings i sketched above, you should work as follows:
First insert the slide you want to work on, then do a "prescan". Adjust the crop size to your wishes ( or as a generic approach leave the cropping rectangle to the full area always ).
Then i would recommend the auto-adjust function ( the aperture icon on the top left icon bar, second from left ).
This should ( sometimes drastically ) change the look of the image. You can change the way it works by holding the shift key when pressing the button, just play around with it.
You can also generally change the behaviour by chooseing a "setting" from that menu, default is "standard".
This way you can correct the image to some variations, at first may not understanding what exactly is happening but nevertheless getting good results.
If you feel curious or if you are not satisfied with the results in some images it will come naturally to browse the manual and/or various dialoges to get different and sometimes even better results :-)

So after you are presented with a desirable image on the preview you just hit the scan button (after making sure that the above mentioned settings are still set and not mistakingly changed), find a place and a sensible name for the image file and: SCAN !

This should take about 10 seconds for the prescan, maybe another 10 seconds for trying one or two of the auto-settings and then you are ready to scan.



While this was quite an elaborate explanation, it is not even the tip of the iceberg.
Try it, play with it, read the manual at parts and browse the web, but this should get you started !

best regards,

Nils Heidorn