SilverFast is a real-time processing application for scanning photographs and other images and correcting photography flaws when still in pre-scan mode. The pre-scan concept has a number of advantages. Corrections are performed on a low-resolution version of the photograph. This allows for faster screen refreshes, allowing you to see effects of corrections in real-time or near real-time. Another advantage is that pre-scan mode allows you to take advantage of all technical capabilities of your scanner. This is what sets SilverFast apart from other scanning software applications.

SilverFast has been conquering the market steady-on, simply because it enables users to obtain excellent quality from their scanned photographs with all the functionality required by even the most demanding professional. In the past, high-end scanner manufacturers would develop the scanning software for their own scanners, which would include an interface to all of the specific capabilities their scanners would have. Specially trained scanner operators would be the only ones who understood the software and scanner well enough to get decent results.

Today SilverFast is delivered with the most expensive drum and flatbed scanners such as the Heidelberg Topaz, all the way down to the most inexpensive offerings from Epson and Microtek.

Personally, I have been an enthusiastic user of SilverFast since version 3 -when I first got the chance to test review a Microtek with SilverFast Ai driving it. For our first shot at colour correction, we’re going to start with an image that looks pretyy muddy. It dates back to 1964, so it’s well over 40 years old.

The difficulty with such old photographs is that you probably can’t remember how the scene looked back when the picture was taken. That doesn’t have to be a problem as SilverFast comes with a powerful Densitometer which allows you to work by the numbers.

Setting the white and black point on your photograph

But before we start working our way through the measurements, we can try something else first, something much more simple: a click on the white and black pipette.

The pipette or eyedropper is located in the SilverFast toolbar:

The Toolbar from left to right: the zoom tool - the automatic correction tool - the levels dialogue - the gradation curve - the global colour correction tool - the selective colour correction tool - the eyedropper - the advanced settings dialogue.

Working with a colour cast due to photo chemicals degradation

From the above photograph, it must be clear that there is a heavy magenta cast with some yellow. I can see that from the SilverFast Densitometer which reads out high values for Magenta and Yellow, and very low values for Cyan. I am using CMY here, but I can just as easily use RGB by Alt-clicking the Densitometer’s value fields.

With SilverFast’s highlight/shadow tool, the point of the image that must be close to black and white can be specified manually. In SilverFast’s Options window, a highlight offset and a shadow offset can be set so that highlights can be brought to somewhat less than 0% and shadows to somewhat less than 100%. Why should you do this? Because if you don’t, the lightest and darkest areas in your photograph will not have any detail anymore when printed.

The white will be represented by an absence of ink, and the black will be saturated with black ink. This will result in a photograph that is lacking in detail in the extreme tonal values (the lightest and darkest areas). The lack of detail is only good with specular highlights -the reflections of sunlight on a pair of spectacles, for example.

The values of 0% and 100% are too extreme; values of 3% and 97% will guarantee that some detail will be printed in white and black areas. The next thing we’ll do is find the brightest and darkest point in the image. SilverFast allows us to find those points easily using another tool found in the vertical scanning toolbar:

To display the brightest point of an image, you can either click and hold the white area in the icon, or type Command-Shift (ctrl-Shift in Windows) while in the prescan window. The darkest point can be seen by clicking the dark area of the icon or typing Command-Control (Control on Windows).

You would think you could use those points to set the white point and black point, but that’s not necessarily the case. The brightest point does not necessarily equal the white point (which can be darker), although it often will. One situation when it won’t, is when there are specular areas in the photo. In that case, you don’t want the specular area to be your white point, as that would make the whole photograph turning dull!

In my first test photograph, the white point is the white of a door case. The black point is somewhere in the background and the neutral mid tone point is found in the back of the chair.