LaserSoft Imaging

Just upgraded to Version 8 of Silverfast and have a few questions:

- How do I adjust the filmstrip position? When automatic frame recognition fails (what happened right now) how can I move the filmstrip to the right or left?
In Silverfast 6.6 there was a button to mark the end (or beginning by pressing "shift") of the current frame.

- Why is ICE/SRD not available for RAW-Scans (48bit HDRs). In Silverfast 6.6 this was possible. I really need to scan RAW-Images (sometimes ICE corrected) and do the rest in Photoshop.

More to follow (though I don't hope so )

best,

d.

Dear customer,

SilverFast 8 now correctly identifies the beginning of film images.
So a Film positioning tool should no longer be necessary.
In non of our test this recognition has failed.
Is there any special application you need this tool for?

48bit HDR is a raw archive format which should be scanned unaltered therefor now also iSRD is deactivated.
If you want corrected 48bit scans you will have to use the normal 48bit mode.
Or you can scan into 64bit HDRi which includes the infrared channel and process that later in SilverFast HDR.

kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.

Dear Arne,

thanks a lot for the fast answer.

Unfortunately it does NOT identify the beginning of images correctly (see attachment).
Besides that, what about panoramic images?
Those images (e.g. from a Hasselblad xPan) have to be scanned in two steps and manual film positioning is really necessary to accomplish this.



Regarding iSRD:
In Silverfast 6.6 it was possible and v**s**n also lets you do this.
The only thing I (and many others) use Silverfast for is to easy and comfortable scan raw images (WITH the option of mulitexposure and ICE/iSRD).
The negative conversion is done in photoshop with the colorperfect plugin. This plugin requires the images to be linear raw scans (without ANY color-correction).

As I wrote before both features where available in older Silverfast versions and not having them with this version really is a huge downgrade.
At least for me this make it kind of useless.


One more question:
How can I do Batch-Scans without using the Jobpilot?
In the previous Silverfast version one had to switch to batchscan-mode, then select the images (or even only the image numbers) in the overview dialog and press batch scan.
All the selected images would have been scanned.
In Silverfast 8 I can switch to batch-scan on the scan-icon but only one image is scanned (though more than one image was selected in the overview dialog).
And how can batch scanned images be named automatically (e.g. abc_001, abc_002 ....)?

Dear customer,

Does that happen with several filmstrips or only with certain ones?
We have tested this feature with several films and never got such an error.
Does your camera us standard film transport lengths?

A panorama image would continue in the next overview image.
You just have to stich those two together.

Like I said you can scan 48bit images with HDR.
This also gives you a suitable color workspace.
Photoshop can not handle the scanner's workspace very well anyway.
You just have to keep the setting to positive if you do not want NegaFix to convert your image.

You can switch to batch/ADF mode by holding the scan-button for a few seconds.
The numbering is done automatically.

kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.

LSI_Ketelhohn wrote:Does that happen with several filmstrips or only with certain ones?
We have tested this feature with several films and never got such an error.
Does your camera us standard film transport lengths?
A panorama image would continue in the next overview image.
You just have to stich those two together.

To be honest, I just tried it with one filmstrip.
It's from a Leica MP, so there shouldn't be anything unusual with it.
And it WON'T work with panoramic images. One has to scan more than the half for each part to use the auto-merge-tool from photoshop to correctly combine the images.
A clean cut won't work.

So, why don't you just (re-)integrate the film positioning tool?
There will always be cases where a filmstrip will have to be repositioned.

LSI_Ketelhohn wrote:Like I said you can scan 48bit images with HDR.
This also gives you a suitable color workspace.
Photoshop can not handle the scanner's workspace very well anyway.
You just have to keep the setting to positive if you do not want NegaFix to convert your image.

The colorspace is no problem and scanning as 48bit HDR works perfectly.
Except that I cannot use iSRD.
I could try to scan as a positive image, but then I would have manually set the gamma to 1.0.
Can you confirm hat scanning it as a positive image with gamma set to 1.0 NO OTHER CORRECTIONS are applied?
Though this is not a very elegant solution and I hope you consider enabling iSRD for HDR-scans in the future.

LSI_Ketelhohn wrote:You can switch to batch/ADF mode by holding the scan-button for a few seconds.
The numbering is done automatically.

That's what I did but it only scans the first image and not the other selected (in the overview panel) images.

Arne,

I use both the 4000ED and the 8000ED and certainly some critical features are missing in SF8. While framing is better in this version, the frame adjust is still a desired option to move a slide.

More importantly, Yes it does auto number but in a very unusable way: assigned name (4).tiff for the 4th slide copied instead of the assigned method of 6.6 where we pick the starting point: assigned name 00257.tiff

That is very important since the auto numbering only looks at the files in the current folder for the starting number, but for folks like me who have a lot of slides and assign slide names for very large groups of slide and then move them to a new drive when space runs out, the automatic assignment will mean that I have duplicate names and thus when copied to the 6 terrabyte archive storage disk it will overwrite existing files, totally unacceptable.

We really need the ability to assign starting numbers and I like leading 0s as in 6.6 This is really critical for large archives.

Kent

We have already forwarded a feature requests for the filmstrip adjustment tool and the numbering option to our product manager.


kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.

I'm in the same situation as the original poster.
Scanning thousands of slides, and need to have a senisble naming scheme .

The output settings dialog before starting the scanning is crucial to me.

In Silverfast 8, I was surprised that the scanning started without any prompt when i selected batch scan, and hope this (and the possibility to create your own naming scheme) will be back soon.

Thank you for your input.

Like I said I already forwarded the issue to our product management.

thanks,
Arne Ketelhohn

+1 for the auto-numbering. I have been reduced from scanning hundreds of images a day to tens per day. The naming scheme in version 6.6 was perfect and I really really need this back!

Thanks,
-Bill

Have the same problem as the original poster. I'm on SF8 with Nikon 9000 and can't get my MF negatives scanned correctly aligned. Already the first frame includes 1/3 of the second frame, and the second frame half of the third frame. That happens with every film stripe I use.

Needless to say, that this makes the software unusable for me. Any idea when you have a fix for that?

mbusch wrote:Have the same problem as the original poster. I'm on SF8 with Nikon 9000 and can't get my MF negatives scanned correctly aligned. Already the first frame includes 1/3 of the second frame, and the second frame half of the third frame. That happens with every film stripe I use.

Needless to say, that this makes the software unusable for me. Any idea when you have a fix for that?

I have this problem too. It's very frustrating that there is no facility to adjust the spacing. Now with SF8 the first frame of 6x6 is OK (with a bit extra) the 2nd frame is mostly available and the 3rd frame only captures 2/3rd of the frame. My film is trimmed straight and has always been fine in the past. This happens with all my film strips too. Please fix this or add the ability to adjust back into the software. SF8 seems like a step backwards.

We are currently testing the necessary offset tool.
It will be included in an upcoming update.

Kind regards,
Arne ketelhohn.

The Film Offset Tool is now available through our current update.

Kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn

Good evening Arne,

You said that the strip offset tool is back in the latest (test) version, 8.0.1.r5 as of Feb 3, 2012. I have downloaded this code, and DID NOT SEE THAT TOOL.
Sorry to insist, but using the Nikon 9000 it appears essential to be able to fine tune the strip position. Otherwise, there is no way to work.
I also asked Nikon, who recently REVISED the scanner entirely, and they did not see any problem.

Tried 120 film, with strip placed at either end of the holder, the result is the same, USELESS.

Regards, Philippe