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Re: [OM] Bi-Weekly Film Report

Subject: Re: [OM] Bi-Weekly Film Report
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 03:08:54 -0700
On 10/29/2010 9:49 AM, Ken Norton wrote:
> ...
> Much of the film has been ancient long-since expired Fujifilm NPZ 800 (always 
> frozen) that I picked of three packages of for a song. It's been a little 
> hit-and-miss with this film. I believe the age has affected it a bit,
> probably fogged a touch by xrays or who knows what. But the main problem I've 
> run into is blocked-up highlights. Scanning has proven to be a touch pickier 
> than I expected.
>
> So, on two different rolls, I did photograph the IT8 target as well as my 
> entire test fixture. I tested the IT8 target with flash and in direct sun. 
> Wow, what a revelation. Folks, can you save yourselves a lot of grief and
> just buy yourself an IT8 target to calibrate your cameras and films? You may 
> THINK something stinks, when in reality, it's YOU.

OMG! I can die happy. My work here is done. :-)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    On 10/29/2010 2:18 PM, Ken Norton wrote:
>     I'm told that free range moose makes for good jerky and pepperoni sticks.
>
>     AG (vegetarianism sounds more promising) Schnozz
>

    After this, you can say whatever you want about us Meese. :-)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

> ....
>
> I wasn't happy with the way the colors shifted (specifically the greens) with 
> NPZ, but did discover an issue with the auto-levels not tracking the base 
> color correctly.

Oh well, I guess it isn't quite done, so I'll stay awhile. Auto Levels on 
ANYTHING, camera, scanner, editor, etc., can't 
really know what is in the image. Sure, some P&Ss try to guess, and aren't bad, 
but they can't KNOW. If you use Auto 
Color on a subject that doesn't average out to neutral gray, it will screw it 
up.

Green, you say? Green it is. Scroll down to the small roll-overs that show what 
auto color does to a green scene in PS 
and VueScan.

I suggest you never use Auto levels or in fact anything other than Manual or 
Neutral in VueScan. In addition to general 
problems with auto settings, as above, any error in setting the crop area that 
happens to include film areas outside the 
actual image can throw the auto functions off, sometimes by a lot.

> ...
>
> What about the IT8 target, you ask? What about the colors and dynamic range?
>
> Scanned with either software, the IT8 target's colors pretty much gob smack 
> you with their accuracy and saturation. Reds are red, Greens are green, Blues 
> are blue, Yellows are yellow, Cyans? Yup, you guessed it--cyan. Oh, and the 
> Magentas are even magenta. Go figure! The entire gray scale fromwhite to 
> black you can see every single step. Usually, you get a few of them merging 
> and that line between the patches disappears. Not so with these
> scans.

Doh! All those folks who created the International standards actually may have 
<gasp> known what they were doing! "Go 
figure!" indeed.

> ...
> Every single color patch on the IT8 target is clearly defined and looks very 
> good to the human eye. I haven't profiled it yet because of the noise issue, 
> but to my human eyes, the scanned image tracks the original IT8 extremely 
> well and has a characteristic I haven't seen before with digital cameras: 
> Each of the color ladders in the middle portion of the target maintain equal 
> brightness all the way up. Usually what happens is you'll lose separation 
> between two or three patches of a given color at some point goint up the 
> brightness scale.

Color profile a digicam, and you get the same clear, precise result, at least I 
do. Again (dead horse), that's what the 
ICC profile standards and system are for.

Moose
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