If these photos were going in a show somewhere I might send them off for a nice, larger scan, but since I will primarily print them for home use or potentially put them in a book it doesn’t make sense to sacrifice the disk space. I don’t typically crank the resolution up more than that for a couple of reasons, most notably, disk space and intended use. I do this because I will end up pixel peeping and it is a nice size for a variety of purposes. I typically scan at 1600 PPI, which with the 6x4.5 negative will give me a 50MB file. I leave the drop down for preset as it is - set for Photo Quality 1 - and I then grab the resolution slider. Next, I select the path for the file to take. I navigate back to the top of the left pane and give the file a name. Once the preview looks close enough to how I’d like the image to look I prepare to scan it. Once my path is complete and I’ve clicked back on the dot where the path begins I can correct the color. Now I can draw a path around the object that I want to correct in the image, in this case the path through the bamboo. When I click it I am prompted to add a name, and I do. To tackle the blue cast on the path I click the expert dialog indicated by the graduation cap in the bottom of the dialog box and am given a pen icon. The first area I am concerned with is the sky, so I click the area in between the trees with the magenta cast and I can see on the color wheel in the Selective CC dialog box that I’ve selected the appropriate color, and I begin to pull the saturation down by grabbing the slider on the “S” column. To correct these I click first on Selective CC in the top menu, and then directly in the preview on the area I’d like to change. In this scan the sky has taken on a tint that I’m not too fond of and the sidewalk is slightly bluer than I’d like. In my opinion the SilverFast Selective Color Correction tools are excellent and I opt to use them when a negative is going to need a little more work.
First you could move forward with the scan, or you could perform some further color corrections.
Once you’ve applied your NegaFix profile you have a couple of options. This week we'll finish it up and complete the scan. In it we loaded up our negatives, discussed some prescan options, and applied NegaFix to our prescan to get a baseline for color. Last week we featured part 1 of our SilverFast 8.8 review and workflow.