Silverfast 9: How to avoid automatic stretching of the histogram?

[Peter K 75]

Hi,

I'm relatively new to using Silverfast 9 Ai Studio. And I have a question about the histogram.

I am scanning black & white negatives with my Epson V850. And I have recently become aware, that the software always stretches the histogram within the active frame dynamically so that the darkest point always is placed all to the left and the lightest point all to the right.

This is done even if the darkest point within the image frame is nowhere near black and / or the brightest point is nowhere near white.

I am aware, that it is generally preferred to stretch the histogram (without clipping) to make use of the full spectrum from black to white. But I would like to do this myself instead of having Silverfast doing it automatically.

An example:

In the image below, Silverfast has automatically defined the black point and the white point and widened the histogram accordingly within the frame. Which looks ok:


Image 1: Silverfast has detected the black and the white point within the frame



But if I now minimize the frame to show just a part of the sky (for whatever reason), the histogram is again being stretched automatically like this even though there clearly is no real black point in the sky. Which of course totally ruins the image:


Image 2: Silverfast again defines a black and a white point; but this time in a relatively neutral sky with no real blacks

This way, I will never be able to get a natural looking scan of a clear sky, for example, with no real blacks or whites.

Question: Is there a way to keep Silverfast from stretching the values in the histogram automatically like this? Or am I missing something?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Peter K 75]

To whom it might concern: I talked to the people at LaserSoft Imaging and they solved my problem.

This (for me) unwanted automatic 'stretching' of the histogram can be turned off in the NegaFix tool. Open the expert options and un-check the "Auto" box on the expansion tab.

Kudos to Sönke from the support team at LaserSoft Imaging for helping me out.

 

[Overrank]

Thanks for posting that info from LaserSoft. I think you can also get the whole image by saving as RAW but Im guessing that’s probably not what you want. I do that sometimes if I want to load it onward into another package to do the colour inversion.