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Re: [OM] Kodachrome Scans

Subject: Re: [OM] Kodachrome Scans
From: Garth Wood <garth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 04 Nov 2000 10:09:05 -0700
At 04:46 PM 11/4/2000 +0800, C.H.Ling wrote:
>To most of the scanner users here the color accuracy is all depends on your
>output device, if you view with your monitor you must have a proper
>calibrated one, otherwise the brightness, contrast or even color may not be
>right. It may not be the problem of your scanner or the software that came
>with it.
>
>I use film scanner since 1993, it took me a very long time to understand how
>to make a right scan. With the LS2000 and Polaroid Propalette 8000 film
>recorder I bought two years ago, I started to understand the direct output
>from the LS2000 with Nikon's original software is very accurate. With just a
>little level (not curve) adjustment I can get a duplicate slide which is
>very close to the original. But on the monitor the scan never look that
>brilliant as you watch the slide with light box, since the D range of your
>monitor is not as good as the slide and most people hesitate to set the
>monitor brightness to a value that is high enough for proper picture
>viewing, since it will be too bright for reading characters.
>
>To check the accuracy of your scan you should open a white box on your
>monitor (e.g. open a new blank picture) put your slide in front of the white
>box and compare with the scanned photo. It will eliminate the different in
>color temperature between your monitor and lightbox, also provide a suitable
>brightness for contrast comparison, that works very well for me.
>
>At the mean time, I have tried to scan some K64 with LS2000, I didn't find
>any color or contrast problem. But as mention before a little level
>adjustment is needed but never complicated separate R,G,B or curve
>adjustment.


Thanks, C.H.

I've failed to mention a number of times that the output device we all use so 
often (monitor, coupled with one of possibly hundreds of video driver cards out 
there) may be the culprit in many scans.  Since I use a high-end monitor/card 
combination, I frequently forget that such a combination is part of the puzzle, 
because for me it's a given.  I was first alerted to this several years ago by 
a List member who complained that pictures he was viewing on the Olympus 
Gallery were blocky and unpleasant-looking.  We exchanged e-mails until I 
finally sussed out that his video card was set to 256 colours!  Getting him to 
adjust to 16 bits colourspace virtually eliminated the problem (he said 
everything else he looked at on the Web looked much better now).

I had a similar problem about five years ago, when I was a consultant working 
for TELUS PLAnet (the province-wide ISP for Alberta, Canada, just in its 
infancy back then).  TELUS had just changed its name and brand from the old AGT 
("Alberta Government Telephones," which it had stopped being a few years 
previously with a privatization), and the branding people were upset that the 
TELUS logo wasn't showing up correctly on their monitors when they surfed to 
the various sites that TELUS had already set up on the Web.  In particular, 
they kept claiming that "we" had to fix the logo's colours!

It took a long time to explain to them that the logo's colour would depend on 
the output device -- we had correctly specified it for the colourspace we were 
using, but we had no control over what output device a Web surfer was viewing 
it on.  This dismayed them immensely, since it was effectively impossible for 
them to dictate what colour the logo should be viewed as over the Web.  The 
best we could do was "approximately" for most monitors.  ;-)

Garth



  
"A bad day doing photography is better
 than a good day doing just about 
 anything else."
 
The Unofficial Olympus Web Photo Gallery at:

   http://www.taiga.ca/~gallery/, or
   http://www.enable.org/~gallery/


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