Silverfast Multisampling revisited

Friday, October 09, 2009

UPDATE, July 8 2010

In the past month I’ve been using Silverfast multi-exposure almost every day, in a re-archiving project, and it has worked flawlessly.  I also have to admit that my sometimes harsh comments about Lasersoft I always regret later. Sometimes they can be infuriating, but often as not I suspect that it is mainly language issues. They’re actually a great bunch of people doing a great job of keeping film scanning alive for mere mortals who can’t afford Hasselblad’s luxury good price tags.  Oh, and my comments about excessive pricing ? I’m wrong.

So for the sake of consistency, I’ll leave this article up, but take it with a VERY large pinch of salt

Lasersoft’s Silverfast has long been considered the best scanning software around, although fans of Ed Hamrick’s VueScan would disagree. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with it for about a decade. I love the results it is able to deliver (once you’ve got over the learning curve) but I really dislike the user interface, and I have little time for the company itself, with its cranky staff and very exaggerated prices. I don’t believe I’m alone in this.On the positive side I have to recognise their continued support for a large range of scanners, many obsolete and/or orphaned by their makers. They play an important role in keeping film alive. I also realise that it must be getting harder and harder to maintain their business, especially sales of their higher range products such as Silverfast AI Studio. Which leads me to the point of this article, revisiting a topic discussed some time back.Around about version 6.0 Silverfast was pretty much complete. There wasn’t really much to add, which is a problem for a software company. Nevertheless things were added, often hyped to the heavens but actually delivering very little. For example, the “Studio” version of 6.5 added things with clever sounding acronyms (e.g AACO, Auto Adaptive Contrast Optimisation) which actually didn’t seem to do anything useful, although they spent a long time doing it. Ever desperate for upgrade revenue, a more recent attempt was Multi Exposure. As opposed to Auto Adaptive Contrast Optimisation, Multi Exposure is supposed to, er, optimise contrast, auto-adaptively. It does this by making two scans, the first at normal exposure, and the second deliberately over exposing to pull out shadow detail. It then combines the two into a final image. Initially I seem to recall there was an option to make 4 exposures, but this seems to have been quietly dropped.

Some film scanners, like my Minolta Scan Dual Pro, have the ability to multisample, taking a number (between 2 and 16 in the Minolta’s case) of samples at each point and averaging them out to improve the signal to noise ratio, especially in the shadows. Many Silverfast users were puzzled about the difference between “Multi Exposure” and “Multi Sampling”, especially as they are mutually exclusive in Silverfast, even for scanners like the Minolta where the film doesn’t move. An interesting discussion took place here. The drawback of Multi Sampling is that scan times are increased by the same factor as the sample count. Lasersoft promised that Multi Exposure would not only be faster, but would deliver better results.

Well, Multi Exposure went through a few iterations, and the 4x option vanished.  My experience is that it does not offer any significant dynamic range advantage over multi-sampling, at least as far as scanning slides is concerned. It is quicker, slightly faster than 4x multisampling. However, it has a serious flaw, which others have noted: the results are considerably softer than standard or multi-sampling. This may be due to misalignment, or due to flare or bloom in the over-exposed scan. The result can clearly be seen in the 100% crops below:

Top: 4x Multi Sampling - Bottom: Multi Exposure

Sometimes Multi Exposure works fine, but it is just too unreliable to use routinely. In most cases I find that 4x multisampling gives excellent results, with diminishing improvements (if any) at 8x and 16x. And in extreme cases, you can make two multisample scans and different exposures and blend them in Photoshop. So, in conclusion, another pointless feature.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if Lasersoft really feel there is a future in this product, then they should concentrate on repackaging the technology in a completely new, modern user interface. Unfortunately, I would guess that the codebase is ancient, and I’ve never seen any evidence that Lasersoft have any interest in genuinely improving the Silverfast user experience. Since the competition is at best no better, and in general considerably worse, I suppose there’s little commercial incentive in doing anything.

Book review: Spazio Greina

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

in the ten years which I. have been living in Ticino, I have tried to make sense of it photographically. it shouldn’t be all that difficult, after all there is no lack of source material, all year round. Ticino is a land defined by its steep, twisting alpine valleys, each liberally sprinkled with fascinating traces of a not so distant tough rural past, and an endless sequence of spectacular and inspiring scenery. And that’s just the valleys: higher up are the alpine meadows, lakes of all shapes and sizes, glaciers and towering peaks. And let’s not forget the whole other world of Italianate culture and architecture nestling around Lakes Maggiore and Lugano. Add to this a literate, well-off population and a healthy tourist trade, and you might expect that bookshops would be spilling over with gorgeous coffee table photo books.

But in fact, with a few honourable exceptions, all you find is are endless series of formulaic books about different regions, which work ok as documentary and guide books, but are usually full of bland, poorly executed and (especially) dreadfully printed photographs. The whole market seems to be tied up by a small clique of so-so photographers and publishers. Clearly actually getting to the locations of some of the photos in these books was an epic in itself, but unfortunately, this does not automatically translate to good photography. Good landscape photography requires some attention to light, to composition, and technique, not to mention good printing. And this is hard to get right in Ticino: the light is often harsh, contrast is a big problem, and getting to a lot of locations at the right time (which might only exist a few times a year) require a lot of planning, a lot of hard work and effort, and a degree of luck. Not to mention talent.

All this serves to explain why I was so surprised and delighted to discover the book “Spazio Greina” (Desertina Verlag, Chur) last weekend, especially as it is an area I’ve recently started exploring.

Spazio Greina is a book about 5 photographers’ personal visions of the Greina plateau, a region of upper Ticino bordering on Canton Graubunden and classified by Switzerland as a natural monument of national importance. It’s a fascinating blend of wide open stony valley, jagged peaks, glaciers and lakes. The photographers - Roberto Buzzini, Sergio Luban, Tamara Lanfranchini, Giosanna Crivelli, and Marco Volken each have a distinct take on this “space”, but what they all share is that they have taken the time to absorb the landscape and to find their own way to express it. They’ve come up with quite different approaches: Buzzini contributes a beautiful selection of wide-screen panoramics. Crivelli takes a abstractionist approach, finding surprising contrasts in the detail of the land. Lafranchini’s perspective as a film maker clearly shows through in her subtle use of flat light and discrete forms. Sergio Luban shows a wonderful eye for composition with elements of the landscape and capturing beautiful contrasts of light and shadow. Marco Volken has chosen to use black and white, a departure from his usual practice of colour photography, to great effect. It really is impossible for me to say that any of these are my favourite: it is the overall effect that dominates. You can see a nice slide show of some of the featured photos on the swissinfo site.

Although there are 5 distinct visions, the editing and layout by Roberto Grizzi brings them together for a coherent narrative. And speaking of narrative, the text by Leo Tuor (only in Italian, German and Rumantsch, I’m afraid) contrasting the “touristic” ideal of Greina with the lives of shepherds and hunters who call it home is the icing on the cake.

The print quality is excellent, and altogether this is a must-have photography book - perhaps the only one so far from this corner of the world.

NOTE: unfortunately I cannot find a link for ordering the book. If I do, I’ll update this post. It does appear to available from Amazon Germany.

Minolta Dimage Scan and Snow Leopard

Thursday, October 01, 2009

It works.

That’s it really. Despite strong fears to the contrary, the venerable Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro (I always have to look at the faceplate to make sure I got that right) works fine under Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”, with Rosetta installed.

Tested configuration:

MacBook Pro 2.5Ghz, OS X 10.6.1
Dimage Scan Utility v1.0.0 (Dimage Scan Installer v7.4, 5 Oct 2005)
Silverfast AI Studio v6.6.0r5

No noticeable issues of any kind with either application.

That’s a relief….

New photo galleries launched

Friday, September 25, 2009

At last.

Somewhere around one year ago - possibly longer, I don’t remember - and shortly after being awarded “website of the month” by Outdoor Photography, I decided to take my photo galleries, and indeed my whole website, offline.

The website itself was getting old and creaky, and was becoming a real rat’s nest of patched together hand built code.  I wanted to replace it with something easier to maintain, more flexible, and based on something reasonably solid. This I finished a while ago.  But the other issue was the photographic content.

I used to host over 700 photos online, divided into about 10 galleries. Despite the fact that I got a lot of good feedback, this was clearly far too much. I felt that something was wrong, and some good advice from a friend convinced me I needed to cut down the quantity drastically, and focus on quality, and the message I want to send.

Unfortunately, whatever things I may be any good at, editing is not one of them.  The task of selecting a handful of photos to show from a collection of well over 15,000 was not easy. And it was made harder, when, early this year, I indulged myself in a high quality Quato display. Photos that I had discarded for being uninteresting or flawed suddenly popped into life on this new monitor, and I realised I was going to have to take another look at my archives.  I’ve recently completed reprocessing and evaluating just about all of my several thousand photos from Iceland, and the results of this exercise (started around March, finished a few weeks ago) are the subject of the first two of my new galleries.

The new thumbnails layout

Now that the technical stuff is completed, I can finally give my full attention to the fun part - the photography. I’ll be adding more galleries in the (relatively) near future, in particular panoramic format photos from Iceland and elsewhere, and at least one Ticino gallery.

I certainly want to avoid getting back into the quantity overload scenario, but I do want to try to show a representative selection. Probably I will inaugurate a “recent work” gallery soon, with more rapidly evolving content. I may also showcase some of my infra red photography, as well as black & white, since I seem to be doing more of that these days.

But for now, I’m just relieved that I’ve finally got something to show again.

NOTE: Although I try to test as much as possible on different web browsers, some bugs might lurk.  In particular I’ve noticed an intermittent and baffling bug in (surprise, surprise) Internet Explorer (7 & 8, I cannot be bothered with 6).  Full size images sometimes display with a white band across them. Refreshing the page clears it up.  I’ll try to fix this, but I’m not going to hold back from going live because of bloody Microsoft.

the Internet Explorer bug. No website is complete without one.

Book Review: Within the Frame

Thursday, August 27, 2009

I recently finished reading “Within the Frame“, by David duChemin. Subtitled “The Journey of Photographic Vision” (that’s right, THE, not “A”), it has received pretty much unanimous rave reviews from all quarters. And I’m going to go against the flow.

Let me say up front that duChemin seems to be a genuine, likable character, and his intentions are excellent. He sets out to avoid geekery, and by and large he succeeds, although it would be interesting to see what difference it would make to the book - apart from making it commendably shorter - if he left out the chapter on gear.

But the book has many problems, and for me it was a real slog to get through. First of all, it is far, far too long. Early on, the author makes a joke about repeating the word “vision” too often. Well, that, I can live with - it’s the topic, after all. But worse is the multiple repetition of themes and ideas throughout the book, which verge on hectoring at times. It’s a technique that might work in a classroom presentation, but it doesn’t work a book. The text could be half the length and loose nothing in content.

Next, I found most of the content to be statements of the obvious. The fact that it all boils down to putting yourself in an interesting location, keeping your eyes open, and engaging with the subject isn’t exactly rocket science. My impression is that the book doesn’t really have a clear audience. It ends up a lot more “Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Photography” than I suspect it pretends to be. I was hoping for something a few notches higher.

Third, the scope. This is very much A Journey. David duChemin’s main photographic theme is street / portrait photography in a few far flung locations like India and Cuba, and unless you’re into that sort of thing, the illustrating images are soon going to get pretty monotonous. He makes a half-hearted stab at landscape photography, but he’d have done better not to bother. He doesn’t get it.

Finally there’s the photography itself. Personally, if I ever have to flick through yet another average set of narrow depth of field closeup portraits of elderly asian rustics, it will be far too soon. The book’s readers might have been better served with at least some examples which did not require the author to travel half way around the globe. This is of course highly subjective, but I don’t find David duChemin to be a particularly interesting or indeed talented photographer. He’s certainly better than I am - but that’s not difficult. On the other hand, he has nothing of the skill of, say, Steve McCurry, in drawing you into people’s lives and locations. Whether or not he avoids zoom lenses, the bulk of his photos feel like the work of a curious, detached onlooker with a ticket for the next city in his pocket.

With not only a foreword by Joe McNally but also an afterword by Vincent Versace, not to mention close associations with Scott Kelby - the archetypal gearhead - he’s clearly paid his dues on the networking and backslapping front. As they say, to make a business in photography, first you need to be a businessman. The marketing effort supporting the book is impressive and commendable. But ... well, sorry, but it’s just as well.

I wanted to like this book. After all I paid good money for it. I was hoping it would provide similar insights to two excellent books on photographic vision, Landscape Within and Landscape Beyond, by David Ward. But, at least as far as I’m concerned, it just ended up being irritating.

Oh, and note to the editor: for the non-US market, cut out the cringey God stuff. Please.