After coming back from vacation together with quite some film to be scanned I am back to an old problem of mine with my scanner Microtek F1.
The problem:
slides have strong cast towards magenta in middle tones and even more in shades. Strong post processing is needed to remove it.
Short tech part:
I run Microtech F1 with Silverfast Ai with MacBook (10.5.8). I use IT8 target (Kodak Ektachrome) that came along with the Silverfast. The calibration procedure is fast.
For the scans below - all were done on 6x6 Velvia 100 slide with NO in scanner adjustments (apart from the calibration, obviously).
All images are clickable to get larger versions.
I use a Velvia 100 6x6 slide to show the problem, but I have experienced this also with Provia and Astia.
If I scan the calibration slide itself AFTER the calibration - everything looks fine. Please note that apart from resizing and converting to sRGB there was no post processing applied. The conversion from Adobe1998 to sRGB introduces differences that are negligible to the problem discussed.
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Now here is a sample scan without any adjustments:
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The same scan after making it a bit lighter (global level adjustment) to make the problem more obvious:
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After basic color-wise level adjustment trying to get closer to that how the slide actually looks:
But there is one more problem that comes along - namely the red colors tend to get step-wise extremely red - like the red channel would run out of color space or something. The struck areas are suddenly much more red than should be and look very unnatural. This problem can also be seen in deep shades
This is not the best slide to show this problem, but just trust me - it is there without ANY post processing and can look VERY nasty if there are some truly red objects (like a red sofa or human skin shot under bulb light)
CONTINUED on first answer ....
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