Hi, I'm trying that now, I realized the color right off the bat is really off even with the pre selected film stock, do you manually adjust your colors a lot? I didn't need to play with the colors this much in epson scan and the colors were pretty consistantly correct on epson, any tips on this or maybe I'm using it wrong?
I usually take the raw linear 64bitRGBi scans out of silverfast and invert them myself so the color and such is under my control as much as possible.
If i were to allow silverfast to invert my scans I would turn off as much of the processing as possible by closing all of the panels in the sidebar that are possible to close. If an adjustment can be turned off turn it off.
You should be left with two main adjustment windows in the left hand sidebar: negafix and picture settings. You can’t close negafix but you can turn it off by setting it to its default setting of other other default(? something like that) but negafix could be to your liking if you set it to whatever setting you prefer, that is to say some people like to use it. You also want to turn off the CCR and Auto checkboxes.
In picture settings you want all the sliders set to their default (0, 0, 0)
Then you do your prescan and create your bounding box around the image area. You want to get as close to the edge of the image area as possible without cutting off parts of your image. The software will be thrown off in its calculations by the color of the rebate. The more rebate you leave in the scan the further off your scan will be.
Once you have your bounding box set you should see a preview of your scan in it. Play with the settings in negafix first to get the image to your liking. Turn on and off CCR to see if it removes a color cast, turn on and off Auto to see if you prefer the tones either way.
note that there is a bug in which some versions of silverfast will not turn off the Auto setting once it’s turned on, you can flip the switch as much as you like but it stays on once turned on. The way to fix this is to turn Auto off and delete the bounding box and then make a new bounding box. This will reset the checkbox to its off setting.
Play with all the sliders and settings in negafix to get a feel for what they can do, set the film settings to various films to see what you like or if you like and get a handle on negafix before you move on. Note that you can use any negafix film settings on any film you like, you don’t have to set it to the emulsion you are scanning, if you find a setting that works better for you then go for it.
Then if you see a problem with your image that negafix isn’t able to address, you turn to the picture settings sidebar. These adjustments are fairly straightforward.
You may also want to turn on the IR dust removal tool for your color negatives, it’s called iSRD you will have to play with the settings to get a result you like. I don’t like it and won’t use it, preferring to remove dust and scratches by hand in photoshop. It won’t work for black and white film as silver crystals are completely opaque to IR.
You have to follow all of these steps for each bounding box you make, but each time you make a bounding box it copies the settings from the previous bounding box. So if you have a bunch of similar frames the same settings will work for all of them and can be automatically copied over to each.
Before you scan make sure the resolution file name and path are all set properly for each bounding box. You must set these for each bounding box or you will get the wrong resolution on all but the ones you set. These settings also copy over to the newest bounding box so you don’t necessarily have to set them all by hand but definitely double check before you scan.
If there are problems with an image you can’t fix by following these steps, I recommend you fix them in photoshop as it is non destructive. If you don’t have photoshop or something like it you can use the curves panel in silverfast to make the necessary adjustments. I don’t recommend this.
If you’re going to scan film I think you’d better have photoshop for your own sake.
Your scans will be output from silverfast with the color space of your scanner. This is a problem for everyone but you. You will need to change the color space to the latest SRGB or other people will see your images all messed up on their screens. You also have the option of scanning with 16bits per color channel, this is extremely useful for doing further editing of your files but it will make your files very large. You will have to down sample to 8 bit color if you want to post your files online. Always convert to SRBG before you downsample to 8bit, and always make sure that your file is flattened before you convert to SRGB or it will mess up your colors.
I think that should cover 99% of it. Excuse the info dump. Let me know if you have any questions.
