Thank you. Excellent tutorial. Just received my Plustek 8200i with Silverfast SE and although I managed to get a pretty decent scan from it, understanding what I'm actually doing will be very useful.
Great help but I still not sure why my slides are not showing in the big pre-view screen - it scans a slide and I can follow the scanning in the small pre-scan window but when it finishes the scanning that pic disappears and I have nothing to work with....any idea what I am missinig?? Using Plustek OpticFilm8200i on a Mac iOs 13.2.1 Thanks
I'm very interested in purchasing an Epson V850 scanner as I have a mammoth amount of slides that I want to digitise. Your video was most informative but I'm yet to find one that shows how to scan 35mm slides that are mounted. I'm interested in doing batch scans due to the large number.
Hi Jonathan Great video and thank you for sharing. This video was really helpful to me, I recently started shooting film and your video helped me learn about Silverfast. I am a film shooter and I recently shared a video where I was shooting long exposures with a roll of 120 Fujifilm Velvia 50 with my Mamiya 7 at an old pier in Thames, New Zealand. After scanning the film with my Epson V800 and Silverfast I printed a selection of the images on Hahnemuhle paper, they turned out great and definitely have a fine art look to them. If you have the time, I would love to hear your thoughts on my video. Thanks again Stephen
For whatever reason my slides come out really soft on an epson flatbed scan while negatives on the same settings come out just fine. I recently had to majorly sharpen some postive film in photoshop. This isn't a problem when I've scanned using a Noritsu.
I'd appreciate a guide on the quickest way to batch scan 12 of 35mm slides at a time, using the holder. I'd like to know if its possible to do it automatically without having to zoom into each frame and selecting the auto settings. I have about 900 slides to scan shot by my grandfather in the 1960s, 70s, 80s. more from my father..... any hero images I will rescan as desired !
The holder itself actually helps with that, the edges are slightly raised so that when I clamp down the plastic frame it pinches the film and draws it tight. If you’re wearing cotton gloves you can apply light pressure to the middle of your film so that it doesn’t curve up towards you whilst you’re closing the frame. Of course these tips only work with relatively flat film, if your film is super curved then I’d recommend filing it in sleeves and leaving it under a heavy book for a while. If this happens to you the whole time then you should change the temperature your film dries at!
I use an Opticfilm 8200i Ai with Silverfast, and I even have one of these calibration slides for Provia, but somehow it feels like all my scans are too dark. If I hold my reversal positives into a bright light I can see far more details with the naked eye, so I'm almost tempted to mount it and shoot it with a DSLR. Any tips and tricks?
@@TapijtReiniger oh wow I guess we arrived at the exact same reason. My slides were also too dark, I suspect the lab fucked up, some of the slides even arrived pretty scratched up. Fortunately I managed to mostly fix them in Photoshop
Thx for the great tutorial! Will I suffer any loss of image quality if I use Silverfast for the dust removal mostly, then export as TIFF and do all the color correction in Adobe Lightroom?
Quick question: when I scan slides the preview (no selections made) looks just like the actual slides. As soon as I make selections the software seems to make some changes away from what it should be. For example I find that there is a red cast made usually after a selection of the frames are made. Any thoughts?
Change your preferences. You can adjust the inset and also the sliders ‘auto’ can control. Are you talking about prescan previews or the magnifying glass previews and have you IT8 calibrated?
@@JonathanNotley Hi thanks for getting back to me. I am talking about when you load the film in the flatbed and then press the prescan button in Silver fast and the iniital image scanned after you press it. With no selection made it looks like the actual slide, then i make selections and it throws it off. Which sub menu are these under in preferences? I cant find them. Thanks!
In general, I sometimes feel that I should refrain from excessive processing (particularly sharpening) when scanning. My goal is to typically create an image that is kind of flat like a RAW file - I then process it in adobe like I would a RAW file out of my camera. I am a "digital" photography novice at best, and was wondering your thoughts on the matter. Also - I have a 35mm Plustek scanner that I bought about three years ago that came with "Silverfast 8". Might you happen to know if they have updated this software, and if so, is the update free or must one pay for it? Thank you very much for the video! Nice work!
Thank you for the video! I have a Nikon LS-50 and I scan my 35mm negative and positive film with the NikonScan. To be honest, usually I don't like the colours of my scans. At least, they look much worse than scans from a Noritsu scanner in a lab. The colours from Noritsu are fantastic! I don't know why it is, maybe Noritsu scanners have better colour profiles for each film. Do you not know wether the Silverfast software has film-specific profiles or doesn't?
They make individual film profiles for each scanner their software supports. The Noritsu mini lab machines really are at the top of the scanning game but to get one for private use usually involves spending $1200 on hardware and another $1000 on supporting software. Silverfast fits the bill because it works regardless of the hardware you’re using meaning you can but a new scanner off the shelf and still get what you want from your film
Jonathan Notley Thank you, Jonathan! Yes, the colours of Noritsu scsns are so pleasing to the eye... Some say that Noritsu scanners do almost the same look from any film. Maybe it is but still, this look is very beautiful. As for the Silverfast software, I'll try to take a look at it.
That is why you need to color calibrate your scanner; ideally once a month, or, if you do not scan that often, before you start a new scan job. You'll have to invest in a transparency color target (SilverFast recommends their own color targets, because they have a few more color blobs than a standard target). So the IT8 feature is not only for printing, but also for scanning (actually, for calibrating your printer you'd need a different software to calibrate it for each paper and ink combination). Last but not least, calibrate your monitor. It doesn't help to calibrate your scanner, if your monitor is off in its color representation. Hope this helps, Michael PS: My personal experience with labs, regardless of the scanner hardware used: If they don't profile their machines properly, the results are always unusable.
Silverfast SE plus 8 was boxed with my Epson. It doesn't seem to work very well and Silverfast is not a particularly helpful company. I see you are using Studio AI. That is quite expensive so does it really make that much difference to the processing?
Thanks Jonathan for the video. Can I put the lenses of the 67 on the 6x7 mpu? Could you tell me how much difference there is in between scanning in a imacon flexilight and the epson v850? Thanks in advance
All the Pentax 67 lenses are compatible with all the models - they haven’t changed their mount. The flextight is maybe 10-15% sharper than the Epson but the colour management is essentially equal. Keep in mind the Epson costs £800 and the Flextight costs £15,000
Hi Jonathan, I was wondering if you could make a video how to mount slides? It's £10 to get them mounted for me which is ridiculous for pricing! Also would you recommend Negative Lab Pro and a DSLR instead of a flatbed and Silverfast?
I really don't understand why you would want to do so much post-processing at the scanning stage? What if you're creative objectives are different on another day? Wouldn't it be better to get an unprocessed image first? Not sure of the point of this video unless it's to show Silverfast somehow does "better" processing at scan stage than afterwards?
@@insleys Silverfast uses a really high end calibration for scans, ive found that it gets the most out of negatives. Ive even gotten better scans with a lower end epson scanner and silverfast than my local labs noritsu scanner.
I use an Opticfilm 8200i with silverfast Ai Studio, but I simply can't get the colors right when I scan Provia 100F, it just takes a whole lotta time to find a color setting which is somewhat representative for Provia but there is no preset like the negafix option for negative film.. Is one of those Provia calibration slides absolutely necessary to get the colors right? (because those are quite expensive right?)
I’ve used the Calibration slides and can’t really remember if it was off beforehand. I’d recommend the GCC tool if you’re trying to fix it without them though
yes but this is all about how to make picture good to my eyes, which unfortunately means to ignore and lose natural charater /mostly colors, then contrast, etc/ of film - slide or negative, right? one probably would need a reference scan or developped/enlarged image and then to try to aim the colors correctly while scanning using silverfast software.. or am i wrong?
i mean then you can totally ignore decission which film to buy - kodak or fuji or whatever if your goal is to scan it to look good not to look natural for specific film. for instance my all time favourite negative film is 120 mm Kodak portra, but i m not able to to scan it properly to achieve its beautiful colours - i m using silverfast ai studio 8 and Epson V800 /granted it is very basic scanner/, my original scans from lab always look better. so i ve decided not to messing around with scanning colour negatives home at all and let the lab do it for me. but maybe i m missing something, bugger..
So with slide films my reference for colour correction is the slide itself! I also noticed a blue cast when I first prescanned so I was able to remove that using the GCC tool
Colour negatives are particularly difficult so I’m going to be making my next video about c41 colour correction. The Epson V800 is a great scanner and really only faces limitations when scanning 35mm - it’s all about getting comfortable with Negafix and GCC
cool, i will be very happy to watch it! it s very frustrating for me to stare at my scans after fiddling around with silverfast and then photoshop too to try to get the similar results as those from my lab. and yes - epson v800 is not bad for medium format and terrible for 35 mm
You should wear the o % particles lab suite in the yellow light field like intel does so no particle on these negatives. You should built a facility design for this purpose. by the way if you have thousand of this Film that will take Years on the Scanner it's a slow process.
Great video! Thank you for posting this, was a big help to me.
Thanks for the video. It helps. I scan 35mm slides with a plustek 8200 and silverfast 8, and wanted to make sure I wasn't missing any important steps.
Glad it helps, I also have a plustek 8200 and it’s a great scanner!
Thank you. Excellent tutorial. Just received my Plustek 8200i with Silverfast SE and although I managed to get a pretty decent scan from it, understanding what I'm actually doing will be very useful.
You are very good. Thank you!
Great help but I still not sure why my slides are not showing in the big pre-view screen - it scans a slide and I can follow the scanning in the small pre-scan window but when it finishes the scanning that pic disappears and I have nothing to work with....any idea what I am missinig?? Using Plustek OpticFilm8200i on a Mac iOs 13.2.1 Thanks
I'm very interested in purchasing an Epson V850 scanner as I have a mammoth amount of slides that I want to digitise. Your video was most informative but I'm yet to find one that shows how to scan 35mm slides that are mounted. I'm interested in doing batch scans due to the large number.
Hi Jonathan
Great video and thank you for sharing.
This video was really helpful to me, I recently started shooting film and your video helped me learn about Silverfast.
I am a film shooter and I recently shared a video where I was shooting long exposures with a roll of 120 Fujifilm Velvia 50 with my Mamiya 7 at an old pier in Thames, New Zealand.
After scanning the film with my Epson V800 and Silverfast I printed a selection of the images on Hahnemuhle paper, they turned out great and definitely have a fine art look to them.
If you have the time, I would love to hear your thoughts on my video.
Thanks again
Stephen
For whatever reason my slides come out really soft on an epson flatbed scan while negatives on the same settings come out just fine. I recently had to majorly sharpen some postive film in photoshop. This isn't a problem when I've scanned using a Noritsu.
I'd appreciate a guide on the quickest way to batch scan 12 of 35mm slides at a time, using the holder. I'd like to know if its possible to do it automatically without having to zoom into each frame and selecting the auto settings. I have about 900 slides to scan shot by my grandfather in the 1960s, 70s, 80s. more from my father..... any hero images I will rescan as desired !
thanks mate. very helpful.
How do you get your Slides / Negatives flat enough to properly fit within the holder? I find that the key problem with all that scanning business.
The holder itself actually helps with that, the edges are slightly raised so that when I clamp down the plastic frame it pinches the film and draws it tight. If you’re wearing cotton gloves you can apply light pressure to the middle of your film so that it doesn’t curve up towards you whilst you’re closing the frame. Of course these tips only work with relatively flat film, if your film is super curved then I’d recommend filing it in sleeves and leaving it under a heavy book for a while. If this happens to you the whole time then you should change the temperature your film dries at!
Nicely done.
I use an Opticfilm 8200i Ai with Silverfast, and I even have one of these calibration slides for Provia, but somehow it feels like all my scans are too dark. If I hold my reversal positives into a bright light I can see far more details with the naked eye, so I'm almost tempted to mount it and shoot it with a DSLR. Any tips and tricks?
yaeh i have the exact same problem. Did you ever manage to solve yours?
@@tadasgame I figured out that something simply went wrong with developing, the positives themselves are simply way too dark..
@@TapijtReiniger oh wow I guess we arrived at the exact same reason. My slides were also too dark, I suspect the lab fucked up, some of the slides even arrived pretty scratched up.
Fortunately I managed to mostly fix them in Photoshop
Thx for the great tutorial! Will I suffer any loss of image quality if I use Silverfast for the dust removal mostly, then export as TIFF and do all the color correction in Adobe Lightroom?
Not at all. In fact I would recommend doing all postprocessing in Lightroom/Photoshop.
Quick question: when I scan slides the preview (no selections made) looks just like the actual slides. As soon as I make selections the software seems to make some changes away from what it should be. For example I find that there is a red cast made usually after a selection of the frames are made. Any thoughts?
Change your preferences. You can adjust the inset and also the sliders ‘auto’ can control.
Are you talking about prescan previews or the magnifying glass previews and have you IT8 calibrated?
@@JonathanNotley Hi thanks for getting back to me. I am talking about when you load the film in the flatbed and then press the prescan button in Silver fast and the iniital image scanned after you press it. With no selection made it looks like the actual slide, then i make selections and it throws it off.
Which sub menu are these under in preferences? I cant find them.
Thanks!
@@GavinChapmanphotography Hello Gavin, I have exactly the same problem...did you find a solution? Thank you!
In general, I sometimes feel that I should refrain from excessive processing (particularly sharpening) when scanning. My goal is to typically create an image that is kind of flat like a RAW file - I then process it in adobe like I would a RAW file out of my camera. I am a "digital" photography novice at best, and was wondering your thoughts on the matter. Also - I have a 35mm Plustek scanner that I bought about three years ago that came with "Silverfast 8". Might you happen to know if they have updated this software, and if so, is the update free or must one pay for it? Thank you very much for the video! Nice work!
when you install the software it includes all current updates and it should be free, but you might be better off buying the higher end variant
Very helpful, thanks. I think you've just breathed new life into my MF film gear.....:)
Thank you for the video!
I have a Nikon LS-50 and I scan my 35mm negative and positive film with the NikonScan. To be honest, usually I don't like the colours of my scans. At least, they look much worse than scans from a Noritsu scanner in a lab. The colours from Noritsu are fantastic! I don't know why it is, maybe Noritsu scanners have better colour profiles for each film. Do you not know wether the Silverfast software has film-specific profiles or doesn't?
They make individual film profiles for each scanner their software supports. The Noritsu mini lab machines really are at the top of the scanning game but to get one for private use usually involves spending $1200 on hardware and another $1000 on supporting software. Silverfast fits the bill because it works regardless of the hardware you’re using meaning you can but a new scanner off the shelf and still get what you want from your film
Jonathan Notley Thank you, Jonathan! Yes, the colours of Noritsu scsns are so pleasing to the eye... Some say that Noritsu scanners do almost the same look from any film. Maybe it is but still, this look is very beautiful. As for the Silverfast software, I'll try to take a look at it.
It has negafix film stock profiles, but only for negatives
That is why you need to color calibrate your scanner; ideally once a month, or, if you do not scan that often, before you start a new scan job.
You'll have to invest in a transparency color target (SilverFast recommends their own color targets, because they have a few more color blobs than a standard target).
So the IT8 feature is not only for printing, but also for scanning (actually, for calibrating your printer you'd need a different software to calibrate it for each paper and ink combination).
Last but not least, calibrate your monitor. It doesn't help to calibrate your scanner, if your monitor is off in its color representation.
Hope this helps, Michael
PS: My personal experience with labs, regardless of the scanner hardware used: If they don't profile their machines properly, the results are always unusable.
Silverfast SE plus 8 was boxed with my Epson. It doesn't seem to work very well and Silverfast is not a particularly helpful company. I see you are using Studio AI. That is quite expensive so does it really make that much difference to the processing?
Thanks Jonathan for the video. Can I put the lenses of the 67 on the 6x7 mpu? Could you tell me how much difference there is in between scanning in a imacon flexilight and the epson v850? Thanks in advance
All the Pentax 67 lenses are compatible with all the models - they haven’t changed their mount. The flextight is maybe 10-15% sharper than the Epson but the colour management is essentially equal. Keep in mind the Epson costs £800 and the Flextight costs £15,000
Thanks, yes I know, I was looking for a second hand one, but even they still expensive.
The old ones are slow. You could also look into places that let you rent them by the hour - I know they exist in London!
Great video, but sound very low. Can't hear much.
Hi Jonathan, I was wondering if you could make a video how to mount slides? It's £10 to get them mounted for me which is ridiculous for pricing! Also would you recommend Negative Lab Pro and a DSLR instead of a flatbed and Silverfast?
I really don't understand why you would want to do so much post-processing at the scanning stage? What if you're creative objectives are different on another day? Wouldn't it be better to get an unprocessed image first? Not sure of the point of this video unless it's to show Silverfast somehow does "better" processing at scan stage than afterwards?
Because it’s a .tiff it bakes in a lot of colour data into the file. It’s not a raw
Thanks for the reply. I guess it makes sense if the internal processing of Silverfast is higher precision than the output file precision.
@@insleys Silverfast uses a really high end calibration for scans, ive found that it gets the most out of negatives. Ive even gotten better scans with a lower end epson scanner and silverfast than my local labs noritsu scanner.
I use an Opticfilm 8200i with silverfast Ai Studio, but I simply can't get the colors right when I scan Provia 100F, it just takes a whole lotta time to find a color setting which is somewhat representative for Provia but there is no preset like the negafix option for negative film..
Is one of those Provia calibration slides absolutely necessary to get the colors right? (because those are quite expensive right?)
I’ve used the Calibration slides and can’t really remember if it was off beforehand. I’d recommend the GCC tool if you’re trying to fix it without them though
@@JonathanNotley where did you buy the calibration slides?
You can get them on Silverfast’s website but they are quite expensive.
yes but this is all about how to make picture good to my eyes, which unfortunately means to ignore and lose natural charater /mostly colors, then contrast, etc/ of film - slide or negative, right? one probably would need a reference scan or developped/enlarged image and then to try to aim the colors correctly while scanning using silverfast software.. or am i wrong?
i mean then you can totally ignore decission which film to buy - kodak or fuji or whatever if your goal is to scan it to look good not to look natural for specific film. for instance my all time favourite negative film is 120 mm Kodak portra, but i m not able to to scan it properly to achieve its beautiful colours - i m using silverfast ai studio 8 and Epson V800 /granted it is very basic scanner/, my original scans from lab always look better.
so i ve decided not to messing around with scanning colour negatives home at all and let the lab do it for me. but maybe i m missing something, bugger..
So with slide films my reference for colour correction is the slide itself! I also noticed a blue cast when I first prescanned so I was able to remove that using the GCC tool
Colour negatives are particularly difficult so I’m going to be making my next video about c41 colour correction. The Epson V800 is a great scanner and really only faces limitations when scanning 35mm - it’s all about getting comfortable with Negafix and GCC
yes sure, you re right i was focused mainly to negatives not slides, my mistake..
cool, i will be very happy to watch it! it s very frustrating for me to stare at my scans after fiddling around with silverfast and then photoshop too to try to get the similar results as those from my lab.
and yes - epson v800 is not bad for medium format and terrible for 35 mm
You should wear the o % particles lab suite in the yellow light field like intel does so no particle on these negatives. You should built a facility design for this purpose. by the way if you have thousand of this Film that will take Years on the Scanner it's a slow process.
God, this is like my most hated software ever haha it's so poorly designed, for some reason mine doesn't have Duplicate Frame