Product Reviews

At the high-end of the market, scanning to a Mac usually involves Photoshop. At the cheaper end, it's more than likely that the software will be SilverFast, from German software developer LaserSoft. The company has made a good name for itself through being bundled with many makes of scanner.

SilverFast actually comes in a wide range of editions, from SE and SE Plus, through to Ai and Ai Studio. Here, we're looking at SilverFast Ai Studio, which is nearer the top than the bottom of its price range. It can be installed as a Photoshop plug-in, as a standalone application, or both.

Whichever way, the first, and often most daunting, task is to calibrate a scanner to the software. SilverFast supports a wide range of scanners, from all the major manufacturers and you have to buy the product linked to a particular model. Even so, until this latest version, calibration was time-consuming and fiddly.

LaserSoft has now addressed this issue, with auto-calibration using an IT8 scanner target. This is a high-quality colour target, produced by the company itself and is available as a, rather pricey, €99 (about £78) option for the Ai and Ai Studio versions of the application. Simply laying this target on a scanner's flatbed and clicking the auto-calibrate button runs the calibration process automatically, making set up for beginners and graphics professionals very simple.

SilverFast is a very competent scanning application, with many pro-level features, particularly in colour control. It includes scratch and dust removal, various image enhancements and colour restoration. There's a one-touch filter too, which intelligently improves the highlight, shadow and mid-tones of an image.

The whole scanning process of pre-scan, filtering and final scan can be guided by the ScanPilot, a separate assistance panel and memory aid. There are also QuickTime movies explaining all the main functions of the program, which

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are a useful supplement to the SilverFast manual.

Among its new features is AutoFrame. Rather than putting just one frame for everything on the scanner flatbed, SilverFast searches through a pre-scan, looking for rectangular outlines so it can frame them all. This means several images can be placed on the scanner at the same time, and the software picks them all out. Perhaps because our scanner has a transparency adaptor in its lid, this didn't work very well, with a good few false positives in the frames that were outlined.

An extension of AutoFrame is AutoFrame Alignment, where each recognised frame is automatically rotated, so its baseline is horizontal. With individual framing, you can choose to make image adjustments globally, to all the defined frames in a scan, or individually, so different adjustments can be made to each frame.

Multi-exposure is a technique used to improve the dynamic range of a transparency or negative scanned into SilverFast. By taking multiple scans of the same image, with different exposures, Multi-exposure can improve shadow detail and reduce noise levels in the resulting images. You need a scanner capable of producing different exposures and you can't use it with prints - it only works with transmissive media. Results can be quite impressive though, improving the visibility of the dark areas in predominantly bright images.

There are other, more minor improvements to the software. SilverFast's negative optimisation applet, NegaFix, has been enhanced with Color Cast Removal (CCR). This single checkbox can make a big difference to images scanned from colour negatives. Using colour profiles for over 120 different negative films, CCR can remove colour casts from images by applying the profile for a chosen film.

Most software, and some hardware, is climbing on the PDF bandwagon, and with the document format becoming an ISO standard, it's hardly surprising. SilverFast can produce PDFs, too. The software can now scan and save PDF files directly, though there's no choice of PDF sub-format, and monochrome and 8-bit, greyscale images can't be saved as PDFs.

SilverFast handles scans more comprehensively than most other pieces of retail software. Despite LaserSoft's rather confusing website - a comparative table of features between editions would be a major improvement - and numerous different variants, the software is well designed and offers probably your best chance of getting a properly rendered print, transparency or negative from a traditional photograph.