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Dust and scratch removal: Photoshop or Silverfast AI Studio?

PhilBurton

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Anyone have opinions or observations? Silverfast certainly makes some strong claims. I like the fact that their SRD works entirely in software, so that it can be used with Kodachrome or B&W.

Phil
 
I use both, Affinity and SilverFast's xSRD option. For "contact sheets," xSRD produces acceptable results; note, I'm scanning almost exclusively B+W 35mm films and my "contact sheets" consists of jEPGs. When scanning negatives to high-res TIFFs that I intend to use, I prefer Affinity because I can work on (those few) areas using a variety of brushes and tools whereas with SilverFast this becomes much more cumbersome and time-consuming, in particular defining masks.
 
Personally, I find the effort necessary in Silverfast to perfect the dust mask limits its usefulness. I scan mostly B&W negatives and keep my work area and film as clean as possible, then use PS to touch up any dust, hair, scratches, etc, marks.
 
Alan9940 said:
Personally, I find the effort necessary in Silverfast to perfect the dust mask limits its usefulness. I scan mostly B&W negatives and keep my work area and film as clean as possible, then use PS to touch up any dust, hair, scratches, etc, marks.
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I agree with Alan. The mask in Silverfast is clumsy (at least for me), and the results were not satisfactory. I reluctantly use the bandaid tool in Photoshop manually.
 
Does anyone use Silverfast to clean up "gross" spots and scratches, but Photoshop for detailed work?
 
PhilBurton said:
Does anyone use Silverfast to clean up "gross" spots and scratches, but Photoshop for detailed work?
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I might use SilverFast to clean up multiple scratches on lo-res JPEGs that I generate from roll-scans as contact sheets, but for hi-res TIFFs I capture all of the image data and edit in Affinity, etc. Perhaps others on this thread have some observations about SilverFast's masking capabilities that they can share?
 
To my eyes, automated dust removal in Silverfast or any other software degrades the quality of the scan and is only partially effective. I prefer to do it by hand using the clone tool in GIMP (which incidentally is brilliant for retouching scratches). But I don’t bother to do this unless the image is a ‘keeper’ - if you want to have serviceable scans of a larger proportion of your photos, automated dust removal makes more sense, it’s just not what I want.
 

That's what I do except I use Epsonscan to scan without spotting and Lightroom to spot.
 
I have kind of an odd workflow with Silverfast. I scan the entire area of the negative holder to a single "iHDR" scan. Then I use their Silverfast HDR tool to extract the individual exposures, invert them, apply iSRD, and everything else. I find this dramatically speeds up the process for me. But the dust removal works even worse for some reason when doing it this way. I think the alignment of the infrared pass is worse when its taken over a larger area. I've stopped using it and and happy to be more diligent dusting off negatives and the scanner and handling the rest in lightroom.
 

I have often thought that this was indeed the case: the detection algorithm appears to identify a large number of surface features that are NOT defects but are more likely essential to those fine structures that belong to the original image. Thus, I use xSRD only for lo-res JPEGs that I create from "batch scans" (i.e., scanning entire rolls). For "keepers," hi-res TIFFs I use Affinity tools, such as in-painting, healing, etc., to remove defects before further processing.
 
I scan the negative with as little 'interference' (possible degradation) from scanning software as possible and spot in Photoshop. Silverfast or any scanning rectification programme can be (is) pretty clumsy at best. And if you learn anything from using Lightroom or Photoshop it's to keep your negatives clean and scratch free to begin with or it becomes a chore, not start from the default assumption your workflow spots and scratches are inevitable.
 
With the last 2 or 3 updates with PS there is a new tool very similar to others but so much easier to use. They have termed it 'removal tool' and can completely remove miniscule dots and scratches right up to quite thick lines and scratches, plus with care you can really get rid of quite large areas of damage to negatives. It is a world away from the others and it is my prefered method. The down side being unless you have an up to date processor and it likes at least 16gig of RAM, it can slow things down.
 
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