CF Systems plugins

[David Mantripp]

I guess this is a good a place to put this as anywhere ...

I've been using the ColorNeg & ColorPos plugins from CF Systems (David Dunthorn) for a while, and although I find his text quite impenetrable (I have a physics education & background, but I haven't got much enthusiasm for applying to photography), I do find that his ColorNeg plugin, for converting 16 bit linear scans of colour negs to RGB, is excellent. It blows Silverfast's NegaFix out of the water.

Sometimes I find his ColorPos plugin, for dealing with transparency scans or digital RAW delivers excellent results, but quite often I find its first guess to be way off and the UI to be so unwieldy and bizarre that I can't work out if there is actually a solution to be found.

The interesting thing is that these plugins get so little discussion on the web. In particular, within the vast volume of information on his "colour integrity" theory which he offers, there are some quite bittter and sharp criticisms of Adobe Camera RAW and Adobe engineers in general (eg. "the design of Photoshop ignores some very basic properties of RGB and CMY three primary color systems", or "Photoshop RAW is a recent addition and it introduces some brand new misdirections").  I'm surprised this doesn't seem to have sparked much debate, because he implies that Photoshop is actually a pretty second rate tool.

Well, that seems a difficult position to defend, given the vast amount of excellent photography that has passed through and out of Photoshop, but even so - is he completely nuts, or has he got a point ? Certainly, ColorNeg at least seems to prove he knows what he's talking about.

[Schewe]

Well, that seems a difficult position to defend, given the vast amount of excellent photography that has passed through and out of Photoshop, but even so - is he completely nuts, or has he got a point ?

He's a wing nut...they are all over the net. It's up to you, the reader, to determine who ya wanna listen to. I suspect the reason his stuff ain't talked about is because, well, ya know most people are shootig digital these days...who wants to scan now?

[Mark D Segal]

Jeff, many people are scanning. Many have scads of old transparencies and colour negs stored in envelopes or boxes and are digitizing them. In fact a friend of mine recently told me he completed a project scanning and cataloguing many thousands of family photographs (slides and negs) going back five decades or more. He worked on it over a period of 3 years. The fact that mainstream companies occasionally still bring out new scanner models and Lasersoft Imaging and Ed Hamrick, for example, are still investing in up-grading scanning software I think indicates there is a market for this technology regardless of the speed at which all newer photography has gone completely digital.

The issue that intrigues me (because inverting negatives isn't rocket-science) is to know exactly in what respects "drm" finds CF System software "blows Silverfast's Negafix out of the water"; me not having tried CF, given the density of the website and the geekyness of the software. And that may be the main reason why his stuff doesn't have any traction - regardless of any "wing nut" aspect.  

Mark

[Chris_Brown]

Scanning negs is no big deal if you know how to read the input histograms. It's not a black art, just a tedious one. The biggest speed bump to getting a good scan from a neg is understanding the compression of the blue channel and minimizing the resulting noise from stretching the blue data/info from 0 to 255.

[Schewe]

Jeff, many people are scanning.

Uh, ok...if you are looking backwards, not forwards. But if you have a half-assed decent scanner with decent scanner software, you have no need for the magical horseshyte behind the curtain...

Sorry, but somebody is trying to make a living out of making this stuff harder than it really is, screw'em. Shit, it ain't magic ya know? Pretty friggin' easy of you have 1/2 a clue.

[Mark D Segal]

Uh, ok...if you are looking backwards, not forwards. But if you have a half-assed decent scanner with decent scanner software, you have no need for the magical horseshyte behind the curtain...

Sorry, but somebody is trying to make a living out of making this stuff harder than it really is, screw'em. Shit, it ain't magic ya know? Pretty friggin' easy of you have 1/2 a clue.

Yes of course I was looking backwards because it's a legacy medium, but it has a future for all those folks who still want to scan their film. And yes we agree - "it ain't magic".

Anyhow, CF Systems seems to be telling us, if you can wade through all that verbiage, that Photoshop doesn't have "color integrity", so I started reading their paper #276 on Color Integrity - again more verbiage - some people don't understand that other peoples' time has an opportunity cost - and by the time I got to the first full para on page 5 I realised there may be an issue of Photoshop knowledge, so I stopped reading.  Well, this, combined with the fact that "it ain't magic" reinforces my interest to learn more from "drm" about how CF Systems "blows Silverfast out of the water".

[David Mantripp]

Mark, well in my experience, Silverfast NegaFix cannot deal with some films, for example Portra 160NC . It just can't. I discovered ColorNeg through some forum somewhere, gave it a go, and it just worked brilliantly straight out of the box. I actually posted on the Silverfast forum asking if anybody had any tips on scanning Portra160 and my post got deleted, because it was a "technical support issue". This did not endear me to Lasersoft GmbH, especially as I'd tended to defend them up to thern.  Anyway, I'd be interested if you have a different experience. I'm well aware that NegaFix has a good reputation in some circles.

Chris_Brown - Inverting negatives may be no big deal, but if I can find a quick solution I'd prefer to use it. I've hardly ever used negative film, and I was just curious to see what I could get out of it. I don't feel the need to understand the arcana behind each part of the process. I do find that people who really are deeply into this stuff tend to be pretty dull photographers....  (absolutely NO personal slight intended!!!)

So, anyway, seems that the consensus is that Dunthorn is a few data points short of a histogram, and I should stop worrying about it :-)   (note he doesn't stop with scanning - he is very dismissive of ACR too. Which even though I don't find gives me the best results, I do realise has been put together by some very bright people)

(Schewe: I think there is still a relatively large number of people interested in film. They have different reasons. Sometimes just because it gives them pleasure, which is good enough reason, no ? In my case, I still want to use my XPan, which means I have to use film. Maybe one day there will be a digital alternative, but even if there is, it will almost certainly be beyond my means. And I do actually enjoy switching back to scanning film sometimes.  Emphasis on "sometimes". I'm mostly digital).

[Mark D Segal]

Mark, well in my experience, Silverfast NegaFix cannot deal with some films, for example Portra 160NC . It just can't. I discovered ColorNeg through some forum somewhere, gave it a go, and it just worked brilliantly straight out of the box. I actually posted on the Silverfast forum asking if anybody had any tips on scanning Portra160 and my post got deleted, because it was a "technical support issue". This did not endear me to Lasersoft GmbH, especially as I'd tended to defend them up to thern.  Anyway, I'd be interested if you have a different experience. I'm well aware that NegaFix has a good reputation in some circles.

I have no experience with Portra 160NC, but I have been using Silverfast with Negafix for some years now and find it technically satisfactory. Negatives will always need to be tweaked regardless of the software because that's the nature of the beast.