Better Light 7 manual Saving and Viewing Prescans, Canceling a Prescan, Color Managed Prescans

Saving and Viewing Prescans

After a prescan has been made the Save Prescan… option may be selected from the File menu. When selected, the current, adjusted preview image data is saved as a TIFF image file into the folder selected in the Save File dialog box that will appear. The image file is given the default name entered in the main control area, with the appended suffix “_pre”, to distinguish it from a final scan and pre- vent accidentally overwriting the file. As long as the entered name is unchanged, a new preview will overwrite any with the same name.

Selecting the Auto Save Prescans option in the Preferences will cause the current prescan to be auto- matically saved every time the Scan button is clicked. The prescans will be saved in the prescan folder specified in the Preferences.

After being saved, the preview image may be opened in an image editor such as Photoshop, for further examination and experimentation.

These prescans can also be layered in Photoshop with a digital copy of the layout for sizing and positioning during the shoot; or used as a “for position only” image in page layout programs; or used to generate smaller files for web publishing; or used as a large thumbnail image for image cataloging software.

Canceling a Prescan

Once the prescan is started, it may be canceled at any time prior to completion by holding down the Command key (Control key in Windows) and pressing the period key . It may take several seconds for the scanning process to halt, depending primarily on the prescan line time. Canceling

a prescan will cause the refreshing of the preview image to halt at its current location in the image, thus, that portion of the on-screen preview image that has already been updated with new data will remain updated, while the unfinished portion of the preview image will continue to display image data from a previous prescan. The histogram display is updated at the end of the prescan process, so canceling the prescan will result in the histogram display showing the data distribution of the preview image with whatever data is within the cropped region. This may include part of the cancelled prescan and data from the previous prescan.

Color Managed Prescans

When a profile is selected in the Preferences for embedding in the file, that profile, in combina- tion with the system monitor profile, will be used to display the preview image. This makes it pos- sible to have the preview in ViewFinder match the same view in color managed image editors (e.g. Photoshop). The profiles are applied at the end of the prescan process.

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