LaserSoft Imaging

This issue hasn't been brought up since 2005 (post11918.html) so I wanted to re-ask in the hopes that progress has been made.

Prescans in SF take as long as the actual scans, and in my case I swear they are taking longer. Other programs seem to be able to do prescans very quickly, and even SF has the ability to rapidly grab previews (thumbnail sized) in the "Overview" frame selector dialog.

This situation is frustrating because the only goal of the pre-scans is to position the frame for proper scanning. I don't need a high resolution image to be able to do this!

A genuinely quick prescan mode would shave 40% off of my scanning workflow. I have "Prescan Draft" checked in my options, and this doesn't seem to make a huge difference.

Dear Pete,

I do not know which version of SilverFast you are using, however our actual version of SilverFast makes faster prescans than endscans.

The post you have linked is very old and probably that was changed with other versions of SilverFast.

Our demo versions are for free and always available at: http://www.silverfast.com/get_demo/en.html

Cheers

Hey Alejandro, thanks for your speedy reply.

I know that the post is very old — but I wanted to demonstrate that I searched for an answer before starting a new thread.

I am a fully paid user of the Archive Suite, currently running version 6.6.1r4a.

I'm using a Nikon CoolScan 9000 on a variety of slide and reversal medium format stock. I can say with certainty that the prescan is taking just as long or longer than the endscan. If you want, I could record a movie to prove it! Would you like me to do this?

In the interface where you select which frame to scan, there are small buttons that allow you to do a very quick pre-scan of each frame. It seems to take 6-8 seconds for each of these thumbnails, but then there's no way to see those in the main interface.

I would absolutely love to be able to draw my framelines based on an enlarged version of those thumbnails. I don't care that the quality of the preview would be poor, I just need to tell it what to scan.

One strong possibility is that it would actually be quicker for me to just set the scanlines to the total size of the negative and not even both with prescans. Then I could just resize each one in Photoshop.

Thing is... do you see how incredibly silly this would be? I spend $500 on software to improve my scanning workflow, and then end up manually resizing each because photoshop is two minutes faster per image. I do not want to have to even consider this.

So tell me, how can we speed this process up?

Dear peteforde,

Film scanners are in fact a lot slower than flatbed scanners.

SilverFast uses more resolution for prescan than other programs because our previews are bigger, also we use more resolution to be able to display the image and the histogram more similar to the resulting picture so when applying corrections the program will be more accurate.

From the things you write I am deducting you are using your Nikon scanner under Mac. We had to create our own driver for mac (I guess you know that Nikon dropped support and development for the scanners and its software from 10.4 onwards) and this was performed by our programmers practically blindly because Nikon had no documentation for many parts of this task.

I guess in this case there is not much we or you can do to speed up this process.

Kind regards