In my opinion, the 5.5 upgrade to SilverFast is worth it for anyone who works with color negative film as the NegaFix feature gives you film profiles that do a fairly good job of removing the orange mask. I don't know that you need to spend $45US to upgrade both SilverFast Ai and SilverFast HDR (for a total of $90). You can upgrade only HDR and use it's NegaFix feature to do the color corrections and processing. Ai would be used only to create the raw 16-bit file that HDR will work on, so Ai wouldn't need the upgrade if that's how you use it. The film profiles you get with NegaFix are a little goofy. They have one called Kodak Portra 160NC 6x6 and another one called simply Kodak Portra 160NC. It turns out the first one is supposed to be for medium format film (why didn't they say 120/220 instead of 6x6?) and the other is for 35mm film. Also, all Kodak Portra medium format films (I don't !
know about the 35mm ones) are supposed to use the same color channel in auto printing machines, so I don't know why SilverFast would have more than one profile for them. In any event, I used the Portra 160NC 6x6 profile for my Portra 160NC medium format film and it worked well except the image was too dark and it was too red. But at least it was in the ball park. That same profile also worked better than any of the others for Kodak PRN film (there is no NegaFix PRN profile). Be prepared to try all of the available profiles with your type of film as the best profile may not have the same name as your film. You have to experiment. I don't know why that is. Like I said, it's kind of goofy. If you get the upgrade, let us know if you agree or disagree with my impressions.
In a message dated 10/19/2001 5:48:03 PM Pacific Daylight Time, magpie@digisys.net writes:
Is 5.5 worth the upgrade I do have about 20 rolls of Kodak Portra NC
400 to process?
