[filmscanners] Re: Calibration and color profiles

["David Sirola" <dsirola@saylorsirola.com>]

Hi Ron

I feel your pain!

Having a polaroid SS4000+, we have similar equipment.

1st issue: Color negative is VERY hard. It took me over a year and one half
to really master it (well, most of the time), using silverfast and my eyes.
I have never found polacolor to be that great: clips, weird tints, etc. This
is not to say silverfast is much better with negs, but it has the tools to
get me closer. It takes time to develop the ability to really see color. On
this issue, practice, but C41 negative, when right, has many rewards.

2nd Issue: IMHO, nothing replaces a monitor puck to calibrate the monitor. I
have a colorvision spyder, which has saved me big $$$$'s in inkjet printing
costs....worth every penny. I can now say, with reasonable reliability, that
if I need to output to a Fujix printer (or a well calibrated device outside
my office), I get what I'm expecting.

There are many good tutorials on the web, Ian Lyon's computer darkroom comes
to mind. You will get it, it just takes time.


good luck,


Dave
>
> Hi Andreas,
>
> I appreciate your tip to Rob on the littlecms. This may be just what I'm
> looking for as well. My monitor appears to be well calibrated, but my
> problem is to get my scans and prints to look right. When I scan slides and
> negatives, especially negatives, on my Polaroid SS4000 using Polarcolor
> Insight 5.1, none of the film profiles give me results that look anything
> like the original subject or a photo print of the negative. I've gone to
> just doing raw scans and trying to reconstruct the original colors and
> contrast using Photoshop7, but the results are not great and when I send the
> files  to my pro lab for printing, they come back looking terrible.  The
> "Photodisc" target they sent me on CD looks pretty good on my monitor
> compared to the print they sent me for calibration. But it seems that the
> more I work on the image in PS, the worse it looks when printed. Maybe a 17"
> monitor isn't big enough?
>
> I've also tried applying a printer profile I downloaded from Drycreek Photo
> for Fuji Crystal Archive Paper and Fuji Frontier 370 Printer that a local
> non pro lab uses, but I'm not getting great results printing my digital
> files there either. Nor am I on my HP Photosmart 7150 Inkjet Printer at
> home.
>
> I've gone to shooting all digital now with the Fuji S2 Pro camera and this
> will probably complexify things even more. I suppose I have to apply a
> profile to uploaded image files to minimize the amount of tweaking I have to
> do in Photoshop.
>
>
> As you probably have figured out by now, I don't have a firm grasp yet of
> color theory and the littlecms software may be a little beyond my ability to
> use. It seems to be for programers, and I know almost nothing about
> programing. So if you could elaborate a little on what this software could
> do for someone not well versed in programming, I'd appreciate it.


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