DenverDad said:
I am trying to decide whether or not to invest in calibration targets
to profile a dedicated film scanner, as part of a move to a
color-managed workflow. So, I was wondering if anyone would care to
comment on their experiences profiling a film scanner this way. I
realize of course that the subject comes up fairly regularly on this
(and other) forums, and I have read as much as I could find. But I
want to convince myself it's going to really make a difference before I
purchase the targets (probably the "everything" pack of IT8 targets
from Wolf Faust). So I guess you could say I'm taking sort of a poll
on the subject.
I described my experience with scanner profiling some time ago on
photo.net - I hope you don't mind if I quote it here. My experience
refers to colour slide scanning only:
--- begin ---
Reading your conversation I thought I'll add my two cents. I also use
Minolta DSE 5400 (first version) with Vuescan and I am in no way a
professional scanner operator however I spent some time profiling my DSE
5400 a couple of weeks ago. To evaluate color fidelity I was comparing
my slides put on a lightbox with the same slides scanned and displayed
on a monitor calibrated and profiled with hardware calibrator.
First, when using the scanner with built-in profile of Vuescan and color
balance set to neutral I noticed my scanned slides had consistently
red/magenta cast - very annoying as these were from my winter holidays
with lots of snow that looked pink.
After reading for a while on the subject I bought an "Agfa IT8 Color
Reference" target set and began to profile the scanner using Vuescan.
The results using Vuescan produced ICC profile and color balance set to
neutral were better, however the cast was not gone completely and when
comparing the slides on a lightbox with the scans I still could see a
difference.
Together with my IT8 sets I got for free a long discontinued profiling
software - Agfa Colortune 3.02 (now Agfa is selling only its
professional version costing several thousand euros). As the software
was over 5 years old and I was using the latest and newest version of
Vuescan I didn't even install Colortune. However, seeing still not
perfect results with Vuescan I decided to give Colortune a try.
I scanned an IT8 target with Vuescan (with color balance set to none or
neutral and ICC setting set to default "built-in" profile) and then
generated scanner ICC profile using Colortune. I tried to set this
profile as a scanner ICC profile in Vuescan, but it didn't work so I
rescanned my slides using exactly the same Vuescan settings I used when
scanning the target and then attached my Colortune generated ICC profile
to the TIFF files produced by Vuescan. And... it made all the
difference! My slides on a lightbox looked now _exactly_ the same as the
scans on a monitor! On some slides only minor brightness and contrast
adjustments were neccessary - the color was spot on.
What I learned afterwards is that Vuescan produces very small,
simplificated ICC profiles of inferior quality - so called matrix
profiles (mine was only about 500 bytes long!). Agfa's Colortune instead
produced a "complete" ICC profile with size over 600 kB containing
detailed color lookup tables (CLUTs). These tables are used by photo
processing software to interpret and display the colors outputted by
Vuescan and they describe the scanner behaviour much better than matrix
profiles produced by Vuescan. Of course, the big Colortune profile
doesn't have to be attached to the TIFFs indefinitely - after using the
profile as an input profile I'm free to convert my TIFFs to whatever
color space I wish and forget about the scanner profile.
So, if you want maximum color fidelity for your scans you should give
some serious scanner profiling software a try. Agfa's Colortune is not
an option I'm affraid as it is discontinued but try a free XLProfiler or
cheap Profile Mechanic - Scanner from Digital Light and Color
(
www.dl-c.com).
--- end ---
I would add some thoughts to the text above.
First, there is scanner profiling and film profiling possible. Scanner
profiling is when you want your scans to resemble an _image_ _on_ _a_
_lightbox_ in every possible way (it is like scanning media type "image"
in Vuescan). Film profiling is necessary when you want your scans to
look like an _original_ _scene_ photographed (taking into account how
particular film handles different lighting situations and so on - this
is like media type "slide film" in Vuescan).
If your aim is to make scans that would look as close as possible to
what you see on a (good) lightbox then - contrary to what bmoag wrote in
this thread - you don't have to profile your film nor scanner every time
you scan a new roll - you can profile your scanner once a month (like
your monitor) and it will suffice.
Also, if you are not after film profiling then you can use whatever
transparency target you have available and your results will be fine
(you don't have to match emulsion types because you don't try to recover
an original scene but the image on a lightbox). Actually, my Agfa
targets are Agfa RSX if I remember correctly - a slide film I hardly
ever used - I shoot mostly Fuji - and the results are good.
So, my experience with scanner profiling is very positive but the key
question is: why do you want to profile your scanner? In my case the
reasoning behind profiling my scanner was I wanted my scans to resemble
original slides as much as possible - hence the calibrated monitor and a
lightbox as a tools to evaluate results. Now when I say that now I am
content with the results I get using Colortune profiles it doesn't mean
the images I get are perfect but rather that the colours on the scans
are identical to those on film (this is done without _any_ color
correction in Vuescan) - even if it means that all exposure and colour
cast errors from the slides are visible on the scans.
If this is kind of result you are after - definitely go for it and
profile your scanner. In my opinion however you should look for a better
profiling software then Vuescan.