A Walk Down Spadina and Getting Acquainted with Silverfast 9.
Took a walk down Spadina from Sussex Avenue to Graination to document Spadina Ave. from University of Toronto to the south end of Chinatown. I had a sweet spot with camera, lenses and film along with a beautiful afternoon. Of course after Graination, a stop into Sonic Boom to do some record shopping. I chose one of my Nikon F2AS bodies along with ORWO UN 54, like having to rolls in a tank for processing so this was the companion to the one I shot through my Leica IIIG in the previous blog post. This roll in particular is the first one I scanned using Silverfast 9 as my scanner interface.
Scanning software for those of us who don't scan with a digital camera and Negative Lab Pro is our godsend. Outside the manufacturer's interface, it's either Vuescan or Silverfast that will be your interface of choice. Vuescan is great software, and I'm keeping it for scanning documents which I have to do on occasion, it's sort of a well thought out "Jack of All Trades" when it comes to different media. Silverfast on the other hand it's job is to scan negatives or slides. That's it unless there's another use I'm not aware of.
Silverfast to be honest isn't easy to live with, I liken it to be the SAP of scanning software, powerful kit but instead of the software intuitively working for you, with Silverfast it will bend your will to work for it. At the start of every session you have to check where the export path goes to, in my case a folder on an external hard drive, check your output file size, and frames, yes, frames. When batch scanning the frame can wander a bit, and sometimes you to rescan manually, one frame at a time to get it right.
All that said, the end results are stunning! I don't have to do much in Lightroom other than straighten the horizon, crop a bit, remove any dust, otherwise the file is pretty much perfect. I haven't scanned colour film yet, that will be the true test.
Camera: Nikon F2AS, NIkkor AI lenses.
Film: ORWO 54, Ilfotec DDX 1+4.




























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