[filmscanners] RE: Silverfast Aquisition

["Paul D. DeRocco" <pderocco@ix.netcom.com>]

> From: Howard Grill
>
> This is what has me confused.  During the Silverfast acquisition
> I choose a
> shadow  area and tell Silverfast to make this location, say, 12.
> Everything
> below 12 would then go to pure black when printed.  Now I open the image,
> after scanning, in Photoshop and this area that I called 12 is
> now, based on
> what you say, moved to 0 and, I assume, anything with values less
> than 12 is
> now lost and grouped in with the 0 level pixels.
>
> So, based on this, I had better have gotten the shadow choice
> right because:
>
> 1) I can no longer retrieve the pixels that were less than 12 before
> scanning and decide to have set the shadow point at 8 or some other number
> less than 12 and
>
> 2) If I want to move the shadow point to 15 it becomes confusing because I
> really wouldn't move it to 15 once in Photoshop, I would have to
> move it to
> 3 since 0 is really 12..is that correct and
>
> 3) In fact, it would become confusing to try to alter the shadow
> point in PS
> if, in fact, as you say the other data less than  12 is clipped and 12
> becomes 0.
>
> I would think it would be preferable to have all the data
> translated into PS
> with the shadow slider just set correctly but the remainder of the data
> preserved so that one application would fit seamlessly into the other, if
> that makes sense.
>
> It seems to be recommended to make all these adjustments in the scanner
> software, if possible, to have the 'best' data, but it seems to me that it
> would be even better to preserve as much data as possible and
> then bring all
> the data into PS to alter it there so that it can be done with layers and
> you can change your mind or make duplicate images with different layers.
> That is what I am finding confusing...

It seems that what you want is something that passes the raw data into
Photoshop unchanged, so you don't lose anything, but tack on some
information about the slider settings in SilverFast that will be used as the
defaults in Levels. But there's no advantage to that over just doing it all
in Photoshop.

It seems to me that there are only a couple of good reasons to use the
controls in SilverFast (or any other scanner driver) at all. First, if
you're using an application that only supports 8-bit data, then it's
important to get the dynamic range optimized before you cut down to 8 bits.
But that's not an issue with Photoshop. Second, you may want to save each
scan to a file, before doing the really serious retouching needed to create
a final print, but you might not like the fact that raw scans look a bit
washed out, because black isn't really black and white isn't really white,
so you decide to tweak the scan controls to at least get a good black point
and white point.

Personally, I prefer just saving the raw scans, even if they don't look
great, because they're only raw material. But there is a third possibility:
profile your scanner, and save the files in the device color space. This
way, you get to keep the raw data, but you associate it with a profile that
says, for instance, that everything below 12 represents the same level of
black. If you display it in a color managed app like Photoshop, it will look
good, but you haven't lost any information--you can always fix the black
level later by just using an improved profile.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@ix.netcom.com

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