IT8 calibration...is it worth it?

[Caleb Clapp]

For someone scanning several thousand high resolution/bitrate negitives on a Nikon 4000ED of family photos for archiving and lifetime future digital use, is it worth the cost of admission to buy the IT8 calibration?

Thanks

--Caleb

[Tomaz Klinc]

You certainly do not want to waste the tremendous time needed to scan thousands of negs on an uncalibated system, and archive the resulting trash for posterity. With IT-8 you most certainly get your money's worth.

[Caleb Clapp]

Point well taken!

In reading the SF manuals and Ian's tutorials, I sounds like the IT-8 calibration does not work for negeitves.

Do you know if doing "raw" high bit rate scans for post scan processing in SF HDR how/if calibration can be incorporated?

I find that the resulting raw scan is also a negitive (has not been converted to positive). It is not practical to do pre-scan processing with this many negitives, and I would want to preserve 100% of the achievable raw data for archive purposes.

Thanks

--Caleb

[degrub]

IT-8 calibration does not work for negeitves

That is correct. It is only defined for slides and prints.

Do you know if doing "raw" high bit rate scans for post scan processing in SF HDR how/if calibration can be incorporated?

There are several ways to do this. One is to use the IT8 option of HDR to profile the scanner and embed the profile after the raw "for HDR" scan is read by HDR

the resulting raw scan is also a negitive

Some workflows scan as a positive and then invert. Maybe someone else can comment on using this workflow to archive raw images.

Frank

[Tomaz Klinc]

Sure, NegaFix takes good care of negs, and IT-8 handles slides pretty well (except, possibly, Kodachromes). But with a scanner like Nikon's 4000ED, why restrict yourself to negs; try some slide film and experience it's gorgeous colors, deep shadows and fine grain; moreover. there's no color guessing here: you can directly compare scans with The Original and improve your mastery of the scanning process.

[Caleb Clapp]

. But with a scanner like Nikon's 4000ED, why restrict yourself to negs; try some slide film .

...because I have 5,000 negetives

As far as negitives go, in following both Ian's Tutorials and SF manuals, is appears that the best way to preserve maximum negetive data/resolution is to do high bitrate raw scans in AI selecting 48bit HDR output. This seems to yield a negetive scan (vs a converted positive scan). Thus when it is later opened and processed in HDR it is still a negetive. As such, I believe one cannot use IT-8 in HDR either. Is it the intent/purpose of Negefix to effectively provide the color correction/calibration for nrgrtives, as IT-8 does for possitives? I would still think the process would benifit from having a hardware calibration component to the workflow. This conflict confusses me.

Thanks

--Caleb

[degrub]

The reason calibration doesn't work, as i understand it, is because of the orange mask and its variability from roll to roll. Slides and prints don't seem to have the problem as much. IT8 calibration is not designed for negatives. Period. Negafix was designed to provide some of the color correction for negatives, however, i think you will find that you will need to tweak the profiles some. You should experiment and find what works for you scanner and what an acceptable scan looks like to you. There really is no "perfect" result. For archival purposes, you could just scan to HDR output and archive the result. Later, you can do the corrections in HDR.

Frank