Quote Originally Posted by Peter De Smidt View Post
Right. There's no IT8 calibration for negatives.
Yes. The problem is that the density range of positives falls in a sufficiently narrow range that a single test target can be used to give you more or less a satisfactory calibration. Tranny film has to work this way; its original design purpose was for the tranny to be projected (remember all those slide projectors with the round trays?). That's not going to work well unless the resulting film after processing has a convincing black and something close to a convincing white. No one wants to see gray mush projected on a screen.

Color negative film on the other hand typically gives you a huge range of densities. I've got a few sheets that show less than one stop between the most dense and the least dense. First time I scanned one I "stretched it out" without thinking about it too much and was shocked to see it in photoshop -- contrast city!

As you can imagine, something that can vary from a density range of, say, 0.3 all the way to, say, 3.6 is going to be impossible to calibrate. It makes you ask the question -- what exactly am I trying to calibrate?

And I'm not even getting into color. That just makes even more complex. So... no calibration for color negative scanning.