RE: filmscanners: Polaroid Sprintscan 120

["Slavitt, Howard" <hslavitt@cpdb.com>]

Ian's tip about changing the Auto threshold for highlight and shadow did the
trick for 48 bit editing in Lasersoft.  I'm now much better able to control
the values in the blackest blacks and whitest whites. . . .  So, other than
waiting for Ian to write more tutorials, or just experimenting for countless
hours with Lasersoft myself (I've already been there and done that with
Photoshop, but at least I can reasonably expect I'll be using Photoshop in
one form or another for the next 5 years at least, if not 10 years), how
does one go about learning the ins and outs of this program (Lasersoft)?  I
find the manual to be barely better than useless (and I have spent several
hours reading through it). . .

For instance, is there a way to zoom into an image in Lasersoft (HDR --
because that's where I'm doing my editing of hi bit images) other than
recropping?  Everytime I try to zoom, I get a message that says I can't do
it because the window is already filled up, so I need to recrop the image to
zoom in which is a slow, clunky way of zooming.  BTW, the Lasersoft window
does not fill all of the real estate on my desktop, but it apparently won't
go larger than a certain size.

Thanks again, Ian.


Ian Lyons responded to my previous post by writing:

"I followed Ian Lyon's tutorial religiously in
> calibrating the scanner with Silverfast; is losing the blackest blacks and
> brightest whites a result of using a 2.2 gamma (as opposed to say 1.8
> gamma)?  Is there some easy way to retrieve these more extreme values?  I
> can of course increase the contrast in Silverfast HDR or Photoshop 48 bit
> editing (for example by moving in sliders on the "Levels" command), but
then
> this has other effects as well. . . .

Fortunately, you haven't lost anything; the data in your shadows is all
there to be extracted. True clipping is when the data ends in a cliff at
level  0 or 255 and nothing exists at either of those points, it's gone
forever. Going to gamma 1.8 means the image will be darker and will
therefore require more editing to get it to the brightness level you want.
You can set SilverFast HDR to clip the end points quite easily - just set
the Auto threshold for highlight and shadow to about 7 or 8 % and you'll get
what you want. I suggest you don't, but you feel that something's needs to
be done then choose 4 or 5% (you'll need some headroom for later). see Page
9 of the HDR tutorial for the screen garab off the dilaog box"