[filmscanners] Re: New price on Flextight Photo in UK

["Dave King" <kingphoto@mindspring.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Austin Franklin" <darkroom@ix.netcom.com>
To: <kingphoto@mindspring.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 10, 2002 8:35 PM
Subject: [filmscanners] RE: New price on Flextight Photo in UK


Hi Dave,

> Calibration settings is the wrong term.  What I meant is the software
> interface leads one to think there is enough control over tone range that
> clipping and compressions that can't be reversed are avoidable, and is
> really not a hardware issue at all AFAIK.

If I understand what it is you are talking about, that is neither a software
OR a hardware issue.  It is a bit depth issue, as well as an operator
understanding issue.

You should NOT be doing tonal moves with grayscale in 8 bits, but you can
"get away with" doing moves in an 8 bit space with color, since 8 bit color
is really 24 bits....  ALL tonal moves in grayscale must be done in high bit
mode, or you will drop codes (get combing in your histogram, and possibly
get posterization).

Is that what you were talking about?

Regards,

Austin

---------------------------------
Close to what I'm talking about.  What I'm saying is even though many scan
drivers let you think you have the ability to set end points they still
clip.  And even though they are presumably doing hi-bit raw file processing,
there are still compression tragedies occurring in shadow tonalities,
resulting in the sort of posterized and crummy looking shadows that Simon
Lamb was seeing and talking about at the very beginning of this thread.
Color crossovers are also a fairly common problem IME.

One solution is to edit raw scans, or easier, use a software driver that
allows lower contrast results, and uses "good enough" film terms.  Part of
VueScan's quality "secret" may be use of the color neg film terms developed
by Kodak for Pro Photo CD.  Pro Photo CD scans of color negs are among the
best I've seen, particularly in conjunction with PS 6's improvements to
Photo CD handling.

Dave


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