The last time I looked, Plustek is the only company still making dedicated slide and negative scanners, since Nikon stopped doing the Coolscan. This doesn't include all the cheap and nasty things advertised in the back of the Daily Mail :nono:
I can't understand why there is such a lack of makes to choose from - there must be a demand for serious amateurs and pro's wanting to scan negs and slides at high quality?
Anyways, to answer the OP's question - I have a Plustek OpticFilm 7600i, which came with Silverfast v6 software. I paid around €50 to upgrade to Silverfast v8. I've used it to scan and restore some old family slides, some of which were very badly faded with strong colour casts and/or underexposed.
What I've found out the hard way is that scanning with the Silverfast software set to auto everything only tends to give the best results with perfectly exposed slides or negs. If you want to rescue poor quality originals without sacrificing shadow detail, you need to be scanning in HDR mode - this is the equivalent of shooting in RAW on a DSLR - the scanner does a double-pass to enhance dynamic range and outputs the raw scan data without any attempt to process it. What you typically end up with is a very dark TIF file. To manipulate this you need to use Silverfast's HDR software (at £100+ it's not cheap).
It is possible to use Photoshop to convert a HDR TIF file from Silverfast into a finished scan, and I've figured out a workflow that gives excellent results. Basically it involves applying Adobe RGB colour space to the TIF, then doing auto levels and increasing the midtone slider. For Kodachrome slides you need to dial in some yellow to counteract the slightly cool colour tint (about +15 does the trick), otherwise greens tend to look a bit turqoisey. Bear in mind that I'm doing this without any fancy colour calibration software - I'm just holding the slide up to the light and seeing wheher the overall colour balance matches what I'm seeing on the screen!
Scanning slides and negs at a decent resolution is time-consuming, and fine-tuning colour balance and contrast for each photo does take a bit of time, not to mention cleaning up dirt and scratches. If you scan at the maximum 7200 dpi you'll end up with enormous files (far in excess of DSLR RAW files in terms of file-size unless you're using a D800
) that take ages to scan. I scan at 2400 dpi which is much quicker and still gives large files which are good for enlargements up to A3 or so. You'll probably find yourself scanning and restoring the best shots rather than doing the whole lot, which will take a long time if we're talking hundreds of slides/negs
A.
