LaserSoft Imaging

Hi there

I've been using Silverfish SE Plus for a while now and i generally love it.

I have one problem though that i hope you can shed some light on. In this example the exposure is perfectly metered at 125/2.8 for a 160 Roll of Portra however, when i prescan, select the film speed and leave the exposure slider on Auto it is definitely underexposed and looks very saturated. This is generally the case and when i have shot recently and knew everything was metered correctly, i still had to up the Exposure Slider to 2 in order to get what looks like the correct exposure. Can you explain what might be happening here? Logic would suggest that having the slider at 0 would be correct, if the film is metered correctly?

In order to give you an idea i have attached the image how i think it should look at 0 but in fact it's where the slider has been moved to 2.

Can you help?

Thank you
Caspar

Dear Caspar,

This is a difficult question, because the correct look of an image is not only a matter of technical terms but a lot of personal taste.
I for example think the +2 image is much too bright.
The 0 image looks "better" when looking at the gradient in the background which is lost in the +2 image.
Looking at the face of cause the +2 image is much clearer and offers better visibility.
You might want to test how the tolerance slider effects the results because it influences how the highlights and shadows are set.
Basically if a setting gives you a better result you should simply use it.
There are a lot of variations in how images are taken or processed and this can of cause influence the individual results.

Kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn

Dear Arne

I'm with you, it is sujective, comes down to personal taste. Who's to say what you see when you see blue is the same that i see when i see blue, but, and a big but here, since we have a standardised tool that is a light meter, you would expect than when it is metered 'correctly', so what is generally agreed (for arguments' sake) to be the 'correct exposure, that you would then get a pretty close fit with the exposure in Silverfast set to 0.

So, just to give you an example. The same image taken with my digital Nikon D810 at the same settings, comes out much much closer in exposure to the +2 image attached to the original message.

Personally i'm shooting to get an image that is much more like the +2 one, just so that when i come to scanning i have the full range. But that now means for me that i should (if i want to scan images) overexpose my neg by 2 stops in order for me to have the range between -3 and +3 on my scanner, (i.e. now, i only get the range of 1 stop above the +2 and then 5 stops in the other direction because my correct exposure is starting at +2 on Silverfast. However, if i now take that neg to the lab to make prints, it will be too thick/ almost overexposed.

Do you see my dilema?

Dear Caspar,

No not quite. If you get the desired result with the +2 setting. Why do you not simply use that.
Why would you need the additional stops above it if you already are getting the desired result?

Kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.