Originally Posted by
Sasquatchian
I've used at least half a dozen different apps for scanning color negs and the best and easiest I've found is still Trident, the scanning app for Howtek drum scanners. When you're analog printing color neg, it's an iterative process always involving an estimating starting point and then making a visual assessment of the result. Since the result is quite subjective you can have several different but equally correct results, depending on who is evaluating the prints. It takes a printing technician to interpret and decide if the print looks right. Scanning a color neg is pretty much the same except you get immediate feedback during the pre-scan, but what IS required no matter what, is a high end hardware calibrated reference monitor and software that does a proper inversion and lets you adjust end points - y'know - black point with detail, white point with detail values, as well as overall color balance, saturation and gray balance. YOU, the operator must know what you're looking for, as it is subjectively variable - just like making an analog print. And sometimes, you still need to make fine adjustments or local adjustments post scan in Photoshop. You are using your calibrated screen as the intermediate output device, adjusting to make your image look great there and then making all of your tonal and color adjustments, both global and local, with adjustment layers in Ps. From there it's a simple matter to convert a copy to any output device you want to using the appropriate custom icc profiles.
As far as input profiles, another reason the Hutch Target is preferred is that is has an opaque patch that you use instead of the IT8 target patch for 0,0,0 RGB, which is, by definition, the d-max of the film, but if you use that you will invariably end up clipping the deepest blacks in the film, something you only want to do if you're doing it on purpose. I've used at least four different software packages for making scanning input profiles and by far the best has always been the now discontinued ProfileMaker Professional from Gretag, which was superceded by the current X-Rite offerings, which make fabulous output profiles but still not quite as good input profiles. YMMV. Of course you need to keep a computer running Snow Leopard around to run ProfileMaker, but that's not a huge problem either.
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