Sharpening combined with multiscan

[Mr.Pleasant]

A drawback of all kinds of unsharpening methods is that it increases noise (intensity). I also found that sometimes highlighted noise particles, combined with some expert settings in Silverfast's Sharpen dialog, results in subtle variations of jpeg artifacts. I discovered that a very good method (allthough a bit time-consuming...) to work around this problem is with multi-scan.

In Lasersoft Ai, I set the multiscan on 4, or even more, and at the same time I use the auto-sharpen. This way I get a very sharp picture, without any concessions on the level of noise. It also looks like the scan is capable of more color details, and has less banding.

If you're in the forum, let me know what you think of it.

[Gregory C]

multi-scanning retrieves more colour data, especially from the darker areas. I tend to scan my film with SF Ai using multi-scan and save in the HDR format. I then 'batch' convert the images using SF HDR to any of the formats that I require knowing that I'll never have to scan the original film again.

I have never considered turning on sharpening while using multi-scan though. what sharpening settings are you using?

[Mr.Pleasant]

Hi Gregory,
I use the default auto sharpen, because the two "more auto sharpen" settings I consider way too heavy. Your question, however, got me thinking. I don?t know if my tip really applies to your situation, since your using HDR. So you might apply the Silverfast sharpening after the multiscan, on the raw data. But for the AI this is not possible. But still, I don?t know if there is a difference in the final result if you apply Silverfast sharpening after the multiscan, in HDR, or if you apply it during the multiscan.
For me, I just want to make the best possible ?raw? scan, with as least as possible editing. But I do like the Silverfast sharpening (more than the one from Photoshop), and I would like to apply it, in a very modest way (conserving the ?rawness?) directly to the scan . I already mentioned that sharpening increases noise in the scan. This especially kept me from applying sharpening during scanning.
But now, I saw, that multiscan not only gives you better colour data, but also decreases noise a lot (why isn?t this mentioned in the Silverfast documentation?). More or less the same stuff 'Neat Image' is very good at. Without the noise I can freely use the auto sharpen function, as it doesn't intensifies the noise anymore, since it isn't there anymore (that is, it is heavily reduced).
But if you do some experiments with it, I'm curious about your experiences.