FOCUS BRACKETING

[tolsen]

With great options such as slide feeders and great programs such as Silverfast scanning has become a lot better, easier, faster, and less frustrating!

With the power of Ai, HDR, Jobmanager, you could wake up to 50 slides scanned, adjust them in HDR in the morning, have a break and come back after the computer has done the hard numberwork. Voil? - finished product, very effective, little work.

BUT one thing is very disturbing. You put in a pile of slides in the slidefeeder. Let it do them all with multipass scan to reduce noise if the slides need. No problem - ONLY till you realize that some are not as sharp as they could be - WHY? low contrast in the center of the image caused the autofocus to get it wrong.

Now Silverfast has a very good control of the focus when you work scan by scan. I'm very impressed. But that's of no help when you've scanned a stack of slides. Then you have to spend valuable working time to go back and find those slides and rescan.

To perfect the Silverfast HDR experience - already great - you could implement focus bracketing. It will take a lot extra time, but many people let their machines scan when they do other stuff or even sleep so it doesn't really matter if it takes long time.

FOCUS BRACKETING could be implemented in at least two ways:

1. BRUTE FORCE: Have Silverfast do several scans at different focussing steps in an interval defined by the user.

2. CONTRAST DETECTION - Placing the focus point automatically in an area of high contrast rather than straight in the center.

3. COMBINATION: Silverfast could detect a couple of high contrast areas and do a scan in each of them.

These scans could be named batch1a, batch1b, etc. Silverfast HDR could then have the user do a quick select of a critical area and show an enlargement of that area ind batch1a and batch1b. The user would chose the best focussed scan, discard the other and continue work as normal.

Am I far off or would other batchscanning Silverfast users like to see similar features?

Sincerely

Tore

[President_LSI]

Advanced Focussing for Feeder Scanning

Dear Tore,

thank you for your interesting proposal. I am convinced that we can do something to solve this problem and your proposals are along my understanding too!

I will discuss your proposal in our development team and see how we can come up with a solution as soon as possible!

Thank's for your input!

regards

Karl-Heinz Zahorsky
President & CEO
LaserSoft Imaging

[Junebug]

Advanced Focusing Control

Would be a tremendous option.

I have a Nikon LS-2000 with SF-200 slide feeder. I do my batch scanning by using a macro program that stops while scanning and plays a sound file "YooHoo" to let me know it's time to go over and do a point focus, then let it Silverfast continue scanning.

Letting the scanner automatically pick the center point and try to focus doesn't work. The images with nothing there to focus on are soft... Or to put it better... Just like focusing a camera... when you 'point focus' right in the area that you want to be sharp... you can't beat the results.