LaserSoft Imaging

Hi,

I'm a newbie on Silverfast Ai, and also on the subject of the Negafix expert settings. I'm somewhat in trouble with the 'auto' function on the Expansion tab (NegaFix Expert settings). Every time I scan a picture with a very small dynamic range (for example, I have this picture of a green plateau in the mountains, taken from above, without any pieces of the sky on it, nor very dark shadows), this auto functions stretches the color range to have everything between bright white and deep black included. Thus making a far too heavy contrast.

Now I can manually adjust all the sliders in the Expansion Histogramms to work to a contrast (and color cast) that is acceptable, but it surprises me that I have to make the adjustments in this place. I reckon that the settings within the NegaFix dialog are due to the film type that has been entered on top of the NegaFix dialog, and not on what happens to be on the picture.

So, my question is: Are there any default values for, say, a Kodak Gold 200 ASA, to be set into the expansion tab (independent of the picture itself)? I guess there must be some kind of value, specific for a certain type of negative (a Kodak Gold 200), that corresponds with a unexposed (black) piece of film, or a white dot, or a neutral grey dot. Hence, it should be possible to give a neutral rendering (adjusted for any type of film) of what's on the negative, without stretching or squeezing the color range.

Or do I perhaps make a mistake in my thinking?

The Orangemaske detection works by stretching the contrast of each channel to the maximum. In this case you don't want this. The automatic could work here, so you need to set the parameter by hand. Cause the different brightness of possible pictures on the film, this need to be by automatic, and not with some kind of profiles.
We have the profiles for the colordifferences between the materials.

kind regards

Thanks for your answer.

Right now, with this kind of 'difficult' images, I proceed as follows. First I go through a serie of images on the same film, and write down of each histogram in the Expansion tab (NegaFix dialog) the values of the limits that the Auto-function generates. After a few pictures with different color ranges, I look for the extreme values. When I enter these extreme values while prescanning an image with a very flat color range, I usually get something that looks quite natural. With these values I can go on fine-tuning the contrast, colorcast, etc.