LaserSoft Imaging

I've finally got my 6.6 Archive Studio upgrade and am impressed by the quality and the new features. A few questions on how to use them, plus an old question I had for a while, about cropping.

(1) I've read that it's important to crop the prescan properly, so that the dark areas will not alter the correct exposure. But I often struggle with the edges -- including as much as possible leads to some black non-image border scanned, cropping aggressively leaves out some image edges outside.

I scan into HDRi at 64 bit. Is it OK to preserve as much image as possible, even though some black edges will show? For processing, can I add a frame which is inside and avoids all black edges, so it will be associated with the scan permanently? Can HDR remember where I put the frame for each scan, so I can both scan as much as possible (with black edges), but also have the edgeless inner frame for subsequent processing into JPEGs?

(2) When scanning into 64-bit HDRi, with Multi-Exposure, I pressed iSRD button and SilverFast apparently applied iSRD right there. But when I double-click on the resulting TIFF in the HDR, it's opened again in SilverFast and when I push iSRD, the processing is repeated. Does it make any sense to activate iSRD during the scan, or scanning into 64-bit HDRi makes in unnecessary and redundant? Is there any difference in what actually goes into the HDRi, depending on whether iSRD is activated or not during the scan phase?

Cheers,
Alexy

Dear Alexy,

I am glad that you like our Archive Suite,

(1) I've read that it's important to crop the prescan properly, so that the dark areas will not alter the correct exposure. But I often struggle with the edges -- including as much as possible leads to some black non-image border scanned, cropping aggressively leaves out some image edges outside.

I scan into HDRi at 64 bit. Is it OK to preserve as much image as possible, even though some black edges will show? For processing, can I add a frame which is inside and avoids all black edges, so it will be associated with the scan permanently? Can HDR remember where I put the frame for each scan, so I can both scan as much as possible (with black edges), but also have the edgeless inner frame for subsequent processing into JPEGs?

When Scanning a 64Bit HDRi file you do not need to worry about the balck edges as we do a RAW Scan here where are no changes applied,
So you can Scan the file with the edges and crop them later in SilverFast HDR.

(2) When scanning into 64-bit HDRi, with Multi-Exposure, I pressed iSRD button and SilverFast apparently applied iSRD right there. But when I double-click on the resulting TIFF in the HDR, it's opened again in SilverFast and when I push iSRD, the processing is repeated. Does it make any sense to activate iSRD during the scan, or scanning into 64-bit HDRi makes in unnecessary and redundant? Is there any difference in what actually goes into the HDRi, depending on whether iSRD is activated or not during the scan phase?

This is quite similar to your first question, we do not apply iSRD but save it as a seperate channel .
So basically the only thing you need to set in SilverFast Ai when Scanning HDR or HDRi is Multi-Exposure or Multi-Sampling and the resoloution you want to use.