IT8 for expired film

[Andrea Gazzoni]

this is a doubt I've developed today: does it make some sense to calibrate one's scanner with an IT8 target when shooting mostly expired film? how does it work when the film has casts? I mean, the target has no cast..so?
thank you for your thoughts

[IanG]

Why would you use IT8 toner (http://www.lostlabours.co.uk/photography/formulae/toners/tonerIT8.htm) with expired film ? I guess it would (and does) give a good degree of intensification as well as taining to underexposed negatives, so they'll scan better.

Ian

[Larry Gebhardt]

Honestly, after profiling my scanners (using several different targets and packages) I was getting worse results than just making a scan that doesn't clip the channels and then adjusting in Photoshop.

But to answer your question, it shouldn't matter if the film is expired. The profile should give you a scan that matches the slide, whether the film was expired or not. in practice I never got it to work that well. In the end I still needed to make a lot of adjustments to make the scan match the slide. And even then that wasn't exactly what I wanted in most cases. So now I just skip that step and adjust the scan to how I want the final image to look.

[timparkin]

this is a doubt I've developed today: does it make some sense to calibrate one's scanner with an IT8 target when shooting mostly expired film? how does it work when the film has casts? I mean, the target has no cast..so?
thank you for your thoughts

Calibrating a scanner is aimed at making sure you get the same colour in your scan as you had in your original so it will preserve colour casts perfectly.

Making an icc profile can be quite difficult and to ensure you don't clip highlights and shadows (you can tweak the scan of the target before making icc profile to prevent this).

If you want to calibrate your expired film - erm - well don't, it won't work. Too much variability in how it expires and how you process it etc, etc..

Tim

[photobymike]

dont recalibrate.... calibrate once... get good results on good film. You cannot color correct film that has a "color crossover".... no amount of "recalibrating" will make it work.... most out dated film will have color crossover to some degree ... make mono BW scans with bad color negs. Sometimes you can get close .... but it never works...Thats why i dont use outdated film or film for a deal. In the end it will cost you time and money that you could have saved if you bought good film in the first place.

So recalibrating for expired film does not make sense........

[Andrea Gazzoni]

thank you anyone, it sounds clear now