LaserSoft Imaging

Hello,

I am new to film scanning and try to find my way using an RPS 7200 with SF 6.6 on MacOS 10.6 (I installed v8, but it does not work- finds the scanner but complains about missing drivers, while 6.6 has no such problems with same box/same scanner). Scanned a few hundred transparents, no problem at all. Now I want to start with film strips and find that the tutorials leave me completely in the dark... OK, with a lot of trial and error I managed to scan a strip... learning, as I said. If someone could point me to a step-by-step tutorial I would be grateful, but that is not my main point.

BUT many of my film strips are not 24x36 mm, but 28x28 or 18x24 mm. The preview does not recognize these formats and always assumes 24x36. Is this a limitation of the scanner? Of Silverfast? Is there a way around this (short of scanning them as individual pictures)?
Also, somehow I was under the impression that I would be able to define more than one frame per preview (thought this may be a workaround for the above problem). I can define them, but the scan comes out as one image. Hm.

Last q: There is an "official book" about Silverfast, but from 2004... this seems incredibly old... is it any good apart from the general information about scanning? The manuals provided with Silverfast are a bad joke, I think, but should I trust this ancient tome to be better?

Grateful for any light in one of my darkest hours as a photograph,
Lutz

Hi there

flyhi wrote:many of my film strips are not 24x36 mm, but 28x28 or 18x24 mm. The preview does not recognize these formats and always assumes 24x36. Is this a limitation of the scanner? Of Silverfast? Is there a way around this (short of scanning them as individual pictures)?

The scanner is a 35 mm film device, it was created to scan the 24x36 mm format. Smaller formats can be scanned but you will have to modify the scanning frame to match your other formats.

I am not sure about the 28 x 28 because one of the sides is bigger than the 35 mm format.

flyhi wrote:There is an "official book" about Silverfast, but from 2004... this seems incredibly old... is it any good apart from the general information about scanning? The manuals provided with Silverfast are a bad joke, I think, but should I trust this ancient tome to be better?

The scanning principles and functions of our tools remain the same until now. There might be some changes on some tools but the main idea remains.

You can download the pdf manual and documentation of SilverFast 6 from our site for free.

Kind regards

Thanks for the reply. Yes, of course I have downloaded and read the official docs, but many questions remain open. I have resolved many by trial and error, I am now able to get what I need in SF 6.6. SF 8 however was a pure catastrophy.