LaserSoft Imaging

Hey guys,

I've recently purchased a Plustek 7600i with Silverfast 8 on a mac. I'm having a lot of trouble with it - hardly any of my scans look right and I can't seem to figure out what exactly is going wrong. Most recently, I scanned a negative (Ilford HP5+) and although it looked good on screen, the result was extremely distorted. Take a look at these images (linked because they were larger than 256kb)

preview:
http://i.imgur.com/BQH9l.jpg

result:
http://i.imgur.com/6nJ4S.jpg

I tried turning off the iSRD and that ended up giving me an image pretty close the original preview, which is good. I'm going to try keeping iSRD off and rescanning other problematic negatives to see what happens.

But I'm still having a tough time with this, even the autopilot doesn't give me acceptable results. As others have mentioned (and I'm reading about right now) my colors seem off, there's ridiculous amounts of grain in some pictures even scanning at 7200dpi, and just across the board - my previews look significantly darker and with different colors than the actual finished product.

Dear customer,

iSRD unfortunately can not be used with B&W images.
The silver halide emulsion distorts the infrared beam.

For B&W images NegaFix offers different conversion methods.
For some films it offers dedicated film profile.
But this is not really necessary for B&W images.
You can use the
<other>
<other>
<monochrome> or <linear> conversion for most images.
Which one is the right one for you depends on your personal taste.

kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.

Arne, thank you very much for the information. I've been messing around with the software and I'm having a little better luck. I'm still getting specs/greenish looking dots on my black and white scans sometimes, but on the whole, they're a lot better quality than I was getting at first.

I just have two more questions:

1. I'm not sure if there's an answer to this one, but here it is.. Generally speaking, my scans at 450dpi with Ilford HP5+ are pretty quick. Maybe 1-2 minutes (I'm not really counting but it's fast). The problem is, every now and then I'll start a scan with the identical settings that takes forever - maybe 8-10+ minutes. On these occasions, the scanned result is very dark. When it becomes obvious that a slow scan has begun, I've taken to just quitting the program and then restarting. This generally makes the scan speed go back fast. Is there any reason why this happens? I don't mind having to restart the software, I'm just curious.

2. My other question is much more straightforward. When shooting, sometimes I push my film (so, from 400 --> 800 ISO, for example). Should I set the ISO in NegaFix to the original ISO of the film out of the box or should I set it to what it was actually exposed at?

Thanks for your help!

The varying scan times are caused by the current driver.
Plustek is already informed about this and will provide a new driver to fix this.
ForWindows systems it will be provided on their website and for Mac systems it will be included in an upcoming upgrade.

For the exposure you should simply test which setting gives you the best results.
You might have to use the exposure slider to correct it.


kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.

I have the same problem however the IRD button is grey and appears to be off but the scanner is still doing the IR pass. In fact, clicking on the IRD button doesn't change it's state. Scanner is a Plustek 4600i.

If it is grey it will be shut off.
SilverFast 6 unfortunately shows the IR scan phase even when it is not doing a infrared scan.
Do you still get those artifacts?

kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.

The only way to get a good scan of a B&W neg is to set it to 16->8 bit grayscale. If use 16bit HDR grayscale I get the problem I have above. I have a similar problem with color neg. Setting 48 bit HDR gives me a preview that looks good but a scan that looks like a negative not a positive, blacks are red and skin tones are black.

The 16/48/64bit HDR(i) formats are raw images.
These are meant to be processed in SilverFast HDR Studio and are saved without any changes or gamma correction.

kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.

Last question: can I use HDR 8 with SF 6?

Yes that is possible.


kind regards