Re: FULL Silverfast 8 Crack 13
Kirby Apodaca
A difficult 2020 that has blended into a difficult 2021 has made it harder for many of us to get outside and shoot, but that doesn't mean you have to neglect your photography. If you're like me, you probably still have years' worth of unscanned slides and negatives waiting to be tended to some rainy day, and a COVID lockdown gives you a golden opportunity.
But are you better off using the software that came with your scanner, or should you shell out for a third-party alternative to get the best results? Before I rolled up my sleeves and started scanning, I wanted to answer this question for myself.
All three applications were tested with Windows 10 version 1909 on a 2018 Dell XPS 15 9570 alongside an Epson Perfection V850 Pro scanner. SilverFast SE Plus costs $99, although it was included free in the bundle with our Epson V850 Pro. VueScan Professional, meanwhile, is ordinarily $99.95.
Since I'm looking at this from the perspective of film scanning, I'm limiting my comparisons solely to scanning of positive and negative strip film and slides, and won't be considering features like document or photo print scanning, copying, OCR, and the like.
As is often the case with software from hardware manufacturers, Epson Scan's Professional Mode user interface feels quite dated and somewhat unintuitive. It's split across five floating control panels that, together, don't leave much room to preview your slides, yet still offers fewer controls than its third-party rivals.
Optional Full Auto and Home modes simplify things, but also hide many features altogether. And it's also sometimes a little buggy. For example, no matter how I configured Windows' resolution and scaling, its un-resizable configuration dialog overflowed its borders, preventing me from being able to do things like reset app defaults.
SilverFast has only two operating modes: WorkflowPilot or Manual. WorkFlowPilot only allows single-photo scanning, and takes you through the process step by step. Some choices feel odd, though: For example it won't allow you to simply scan a standard JPEG.
Manual mode gives access to everything at once, but is very busy and unnecessarily confusing. Button colors vary for no logical reason, and active functions are indicated only with a tiny red dot. Help is provided throughout, but the many (and often redundant) buttons linking to abbreviated PDF manuals and numerous lengthy tutorial videos make its interface even more cluttered.
I also found it prone to making me wait for preview scans more than its rivals, and cancelling a batch scan can be extremely tedious as it makes you separately cancel every remaining frame, one by one. This was my least-favorite interface of the bunch.
[Edit: I've since learned that SilverFast batch scans can be canceled entirely by alt-clicking the cancel button. This is, however, not obvious, although it's mentioned in one of 13 separate PDF manuals for SilverFast SE Plus 8 on the company's website.]
VueScan's UI has Basic, Standard or Professional modes, all three mostly using drop-down lists very logically arranged in two to five tabs. It's cleaner, faster and more modern than its rivals, and leaves more room to preview your images. Its single PDF user manual is also unusually detailed and helpful.
Performance will, obviously, vary depending both on the speed of your scanner, and what hardware features it offers. With that proviso, I found Epson Scan had a slight edge in scanning speed, but with a significant catch.
Epson Scan took just under 59 minutes to scan 18 negatives at 6400 dpi with dust reduction and sharpening active, while VueScan took 67 minutes, and SilverFast trailed the pack at 84 minutes. But Epson Scan's fixed crop for batch scanning threw away a significant amount of image data.
Calculating backwards from the image dimensions as scanned, Epson Scan managed around 14.8 Megapixels/minute, just fractionally faster than VueScan's 14.5 Megapixels/minute. SilverFast managed only 11.5 Megapixels/minute, making it by far the slowest.
While Epson Scan's auto-cropping was by far the least accurate of the bunch, routinely discarding 10-15% of the frame height, I was surprised to find both SilverFast and VueScan also struggled to accurately detect frame sizes, as well.
Both apps mostly got the frame height in the ballpark, but had some issues detecting the gaps between frames. SilverFast sometimes incorrectly rotated frames, too. Significant manual tweaking is needed for all three programs if you want accurate cropping.
VueScan's much more responsive interface made those adjustments easier than its rivals, though. And Epson Scan was the least flexible, preventing you from batch-scanning unless you're willing to live with its automatically-selected cropping.
I did find VueScan's enabled-by-default "multi outline" option a bit confusing, though. To look at the wildly flickering borders you'd think the cropping was wildly off, but the actual framing is indicated for only one frame at a time by the smaller border seen on the top-rightmost thumbnail in the picture above.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given they're all constrained by the same scanner hardware, all three programs turn in a very similar result in terms of their rendering of fine detail. In all three cases, sharpening and IR dust reduction were enabled.
SilverFast definitely defaults to significantly higher levels of sharpening than its rivals, though, giving the impression of more detail. But VueScan and Epson Scan's images can easily be unsharp-masked post capture or the default sharpening levels tweaked similarly.
All three programs can give good color with some work, but I found SilverFast needed tweaking more often than its rivals, tending to yield results that were too warm and with purplish casts, even with its color-cast reduction and orange mask expansion enabled. Unlike Epson Scan, it allows the film type to be selected for better results, but has a shorter list of film types than does VueScan.
Epson Scan's automatic tools tended to yield the best color, but were perhaps a bit overly-saturated and warm for my liking, especially in skin tones, and manual adjustments were significantly trickier.
VueScan's defaults were a bit cool and less saturated, although switching to auto levels or white balance modes gave better results. Like SilverFast, it can correct for the film's orange mask, but the multi-step process is a little confusing, and it frequently lost the correction values, which then had to be reset.
Strongly disagree. Vuescan interface sucks, let's be honest, but Silverfast is very far from being that magical solution. FIrst, the HDRi crashes like hell and the SDR works marginally. It almost never properly isolates film strips frames, they are always offset or have the wrong size, and the Negafix generally speaking rarely does the right color correction. At least Viescan is more honest.
Based on my experience I believe that I bought and paid for BETA software that has not been fully debugged. WORSE still is the ATTITUDE of the owner of the company, Ed Hamrick. As noted by others, he does NOT provide SUPPORT at all.
I have sent numerous emails describing my actions and including Screen Captures of each step. Apparently, that is INADEQUATE for Mr. Hamrick to provide assistance! He requires steps that are incomprehensible to me:
I absolutely disagree with this test. The SilverFast and VueScan in connection with Adobe Lightroom stand "50-50" but I would give VueScan one little notch up. I have both registered pro versions. (I use Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 5000 ED and Minolta Elite 5400 II)
My comment isn't about vuescan and Silverfast
But for my use, scanning many dias images form 1960-1980 I scan at 1200 dpi. I actually think Epson Scan software works better than vuescan. And easy, a simple as set the options you like save as a scan profile hit prescan check everything looks as expected. Hit the scan button wait 2 minutes, open cover, replace the 4 images close lid, hit scan without doing anything else and repeat. For my setup vuescan did a bad job with cropping. I'm using i Epson v600
Before I run through even one or two frames, I scan a blank frame, lock exposure, scan the blank frame again, lock film base color and then preview and scan. This way, I rarely need to do much else to get accurate skin tones.
Have you tried to convert the DNGs in RawTherapee? It works very well and you have full control over everything. But, you need a good calibration first for the scanner. You need a IT.8 card and Lumariver to create good DCP profiles for DNGs.
Hi all.
I quite recently bought an Epson perfection v850 and i'm trying to decide which software to use for scanning 48bit raw images for tweaking (reflective scanning of objects, not film scanning).
I have been using silverfast se plus 8 which came with the scanner, and my raw scans are very dark and i discovered i need to get additional software to make use of them properly.
What would you recommend i do?
I think SilverFast is total junk. I've had mediocre to truly awful scans for years and just assumed it was the limitations of my Plustek OpticFilm 7300. Terrible dynamic range, awful colour balance and massive grain. Especially if your slides or negatives are slightly over or underexposed.
SilverFast's forum indicates my issues are common. They can offer no tech help to anyone if you read the comments just the same rubbish about multi-exposure. I think they know it's garbage, for non-professionals at least. Do yourself and favour and trial VueScan for a side-by-side comparison.
If I quit Silverfast (without scanning) and then try to exit PS, PS reports:-
"Could not complete your request because of a program error".
The only way to exit is to kill the process from Task Manager.
Later versions of PS CC may require Silverfast Ai 9.
Lasersoft want around 130 for the upgrade to Ai 9.
This seems a lot to pay just to fix the problem with the plugin.
As I don't use my scanner much these days, I'm not really interested in the other changes between Ai 8 and 9.