Digitizing color or black and white negatives presents the user with 2 main difficulties:
While the negative/ positive transformation can be done in an easy and comfortable way in the SilverFast (Ai Studio and HDR Studio) software thanks to pre-configured film-transformation- profiles or manually with a bit of know-how in Photoshop, it is the second point that gives us the most trouble.
When scanning analog film, you can use the infrared system of your scanner to detect dust and scratches on most color negative types – if your scanner features this additional infrared light source. Some color negatives and most b/w film types however contain a large amount of silver halide that would reflect the infrared light and thus make this defect detection method unusable.
Re-photoing your images (digitizing them) with a customary digital camera doesn’t allow for infrared-based dust and scratch removal anyway.
The good news is: there is a solution to these exact difficulties: the new SRDx plug-in that detects and removes dust and scratches on color negative film as well as b/w film.