Ektachrome Space Profiles

[Doug Dolde]

I just published a mini review of Joesph Holmes Ektachrome Space profile and Chroma Variants. They work just as well for digital files or scanned film.

http://www.painted-with-light.com/saturation.html

[Kirk Gittings]

Very interesting. I'm not sure this will make any sense. Does this method also avoid the granularity that developes in the transitional tone areas that result from heavily increasing the saturation?

[Doug Dolde]

Without really knowing what you mean I would say probably yes. It's not doing saturation in the normal sense. But Joe Holmes could answer this for sure and responds to emails.

[John Berry ( Roadkill )]

I downloaded the file to try. Where do you drop this file in cs2 to use it? thanks, John

[Doug Dolde]

Same place as your other profiles :WINDOWSsystem32spooldriverscolor

But you don't get the Chroma Variants free...they are $100 for the full set.

[John Berry ( Roadkill )]

Thanks for the info.

[Mark Muse]

I have been using Joe's chroma set for at least a year, probably two, for both film and digital captures. They work very well. From email discussions with him I believe he developed them for his use out of frustration with the way the Adobe HSL control works. If one has spent considerable effort adjusting the values to desired densities, then adjust the saturation using Adobe HSL, the image will become lighter or darker. If you then use the L slider to, say, lighten you will lose some saturation - and it is not the right kind of lightening anyway. This can drive you over the edge if you know exactly where you want to be.

I have had only two problems with them that I hope he will remedy some day:

1. I use the "neutral" profile - Ektachrome Space, J. Holmes - as my RGB working space but I can't get VueScan or Adobe Camera Raw (or Nikon Scan, or Silverfast) to see the profile and let me select it as the RGB space to save the file in. So I use ProPhoto, then convert to ES,JH in PS. Problem is the ProPhoto RGB space is quite large, probably too large, in which case I am losing valuable bits when I convert to Joe's profile from it. This also defeats one of the reasons for this profile, which is tailored to be just large enough to hold the dye set chromacity of an Ektachrome emulsion.

2. When one assigns a chroma variant profile (Ektachrome Space, J. Holmes to say EktaSpJH +12 Sat) there is always a color balance shift to red. This is easily corrected by pinching the red channel middletones by a couple of percent, and it is exactly the same correction no matter which of the variant profiles you assign, + or - saturation, but it would be nice if one didn't have to fool with it.

Otherwise they are great to work with and I use them for all of my personal work. I highly recommend them.

[Jeremy_D]

Fixing No.1 above may be as simple as renaming the profile from *.icc to *.icm or vice versa - some windows programs are picky with this, some aren't. Worth a try!

[Doug Dolde]

Joe has just updated this profile set. His email today:

"Attached find my new version of the whole profile set.
Ektachrome Space, J. Holmes is now replaced by Chrome Space 100, J.
Holmes, after being overhauled (though still backward compatible).

And the variants now number 29, and are also overhauled and work
better and with more variety of effects.

The gray neutrality is now perfect, unlike the old ones. And they go
from -99 to +99% chroma. They also have jumps of just 4% in the area
near zero to respond to the desires of DCam uses to have very fine
control in that range.

Anybody who has purchased the original set can get a free upgrade to
the new set from me, but I am about to leave town for eight days,
beginning the day after tomorrow (Sat. Aug. 20, 2005) and will not be
able to respond to emails during that time.

I may preemptively do a mailing to many of those people for whom I
have records of their purchase, but I do need to know if people use a
Mac or a PC to get their email in order to send them the right kind
of archive with the right encoding (.zip + MIME or .sitx + BinHex)."