Postby GButch » Tue Oct 16, 2001 2:03 pm
I use the PhotoShop plug-in version of Silverfast 5.5 with a Microtek Scanmaker 5 under MS Windows. I scan color negatives almost exclusively.
I have found that I cannot get scans of consistent quality using the Batch Scan mode.
The SM-5 allows for prescanning two 6 frame strips of 35 mm negatives. From these two strips, I select individual images, do enlarged prescans, make adjustments, and then scan into PhotoShop.
This works wonderfully so long as I do my scans one at a time. Batch scans, however, vary a great deal from frame to frame within the batch.
This evening I attempted to batch scan 8 images selected from the 12 negative frames in the carrier. They were nearly identical poses of a little girl. Only the facial expressions varied. All of the enlarged prescans looked fine.
At the end of the batch scan into PhotoShop, a couple were OK, a couple were very blue, and two more were much too light. I repeated the process, changing nothing except that instead of batch scanning, the images were scanned one at a time. The 8 images matched beautifully.
I've done some experimenting to see if the NegaFix "Auto" function might be involved. The inconsistency occurs with or without "Auto"
Until we can find a solution, I have abandoned batch mode.
350 MHz Pentium II running Win-98 SE
256 Mb RAM
Silverfast 5.5 scanning into PhotoShop 6.01
Plenty of available disk space
George Butch
