How does View Camera do it?

[John C Murphy]

I have so much trouble getting my scanned slides color corrected that I can't help but ask, "How does View Camera Magazine do it?" Their photos have beautiful colors, none of the weird color casts that my scans have despite my best attempts to fix them. Do they have a $50,000 machine that does it for them?

[Bill_1856]

Apparently you're getting a different magazine than I am. The worst color reproduction I've seen anywhere in years was their article on Eliot Porter (of all people).

[John C Murphy]

Let's put it this way, View Camera's pictures are consistently some of the best I've seen in print. If that's what you call lousy, fine, but they look great to me, and I'd be thrilled if my shots looked as good.

[steve simmons]

The Porter article was 1991. Have we done nothing sinc then?????? The 2003 article was done with scan supplied to us by the owner of the prints who would not let them go to a service bureau

David Muench and many other people come to us because of the quality of our reproductions.

steve simmons

[Don Wallace]

Steve, I am with John on this. I love some of the colour reproductions you publish (and the black and white too). However, you didn't answer his question. How do you do it? Are you trying to hold out on us (chuckle)?

[jantman]

I can't answer for Steve, but I've seen some great things come from hihg-quality drum scanners. At a price of around $35/scan (in my area) they had better be good.

As to color casts, have you worked in a calibrated system (every element from scanner, monitor, etc. to printer)? Also, how about trying a few sheets under the same lighting, starting with a color chart, balancing off the chart, and then using that setting for the rest of the scans?

[John C Murphy]

Jason, I get the "calibrated system" that you mentioned is what I'm trying to achieve. I have the Monacco EZColor software which helps to correct the Kodak Ektachrome films, but doesn't have full support of the Fuji films.

[Ted Harris]

John,



It's difficul tto offer any sort of useful response without knowing what scanner and softwre you are using as well as something about your workflow. Give us that information and we weill be able to offer some suggestions.

[Leonard Evens]

I think the color reproductions in View Camera Magazine are generally pretty good. But it is important to note that every color reproduction may be said to have a color cast if you look closely enough. See for example Norman McGrath's article in the May/June 2004 issue. There are two pictures of essentially the same scene which have vastly different "color casts". One was shot on film and had to be scanned presumably for inclusion in the article and the other was done digitally with a Canon EOS 10D. That could partly explain the difference, but any moderately experienced photoeditor could get them to look much closer to one another. (Steve, this is not a criticism!)

I think my colors are generally pretty accurate, comparable to what I see in original prints and reproductions, including those in View Camera Magazine, but they do represent an approximation of my vision of how things should look. Still, looking at images I've worked hard at getting right, I can often see obvious differences. The difficulty, as Dan Margulis points out in Professional Photoshop, is that it is never possible to get all the colors exactly right and it is also not possible to reproduce the colors in the original scene. So color editing always comes down to a matter of making compromises, concentrating on the important colors, and working towards something that looks plausible.

If you are having trouble with color balance, I strongly recommend studying Margulis's book. He shows how his (fictitious, I assume) color blind assistant can do pretty well following Margulis's method of doing it by the numbers, and how using that as a starting point, you can do quite well. He emphasizes prepress work using CMYK, but I found his principles work just as well for RGB.

[adrian tyler]

they are reproducing in cmyk for 4 colour litho print. these reproductions will be scanned on a high end drum scanner designed specifically to make photomechanical separations.