SF 5.5: SilverFast HDR

[ilyons]

"HDR gets you a raw scan right.?You then correct that scan at a later time. Why do you need the neg profiles? do they make any difference, I mean a raw scan is a raw scan. I may be missing the point. "


Yes you miss the point - a RAW scan is the RGB data straight off the scanner, no processing. It will be dark and colours will probably be wrong (negs will certainly be wrong due to mask). The scanner doesn't know a negative from a positive. If you have the version of Ai prior to 5.5 the neg profiles will not produce optimum results. The new version produces EXCELLENT results with minimal effort. BUT.... you might not choose to buy Ai 5.5 just yet - so long as you do get HDR 5.5 - and that was the point of the earlier message.

If you set SilverFast Ai (assume 5.2) for 48bit HDR output the RAW uncorrected neg/pos will be captured to a tiff file or sent straight to Photoshop (you make the choice in the Ai setup). If it was a negative the mask will still be present. You can even batch scan a strip of negs/positives.

Now when the notion takes you its simply a matter of opening HDR 5.5 and choosing either negative or postive. If you choose the negative option the new feature of 5.5 will pop up and you can edit your negatives using the new profiles. It is really simple and a lot more effective than ANY similar feature from other vendors "previous/current ".



"Being as you can use Ai to create a raw scan and Photoshop to open it and work in 12 bit mode - why HDR?"


We are talking about negatives here - how does Photoshop handle the mask????.

BTW: editing a 16 bit raw file in Photoshop is doable but HDR is MILES better at handling raw files than Photoshop, especially if you leave the file in its linear raw form.

Ian



" Changed the headline for this comment"

Karl-Heinz Zahorsky

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: President_LSI on 2001-09-09 08:48 ]</font>

[davidgordon]

Thanks Ian!

I have HDR but never really used it. I've always been happy to make the corrections in Ai prior to scanning into Photoshop. I've just registered my HDR - might as well see if there's any later (free) updates to the version I have.

I've never raw scanned a negative, only tranies. I'll try it and see what happens for myself!!!

David