Scanner Calibration

What are the advantages of Scanner Calibration?

Virtually all scanners have an inherent "colour cast", usually magenta or green, that is often very evident in neutral greys. When scanning a slide, the "Cast" is effectively superimposed with your image, making its subsequent removal in Photoshop very difficult at times. Scanner calibration will effectively remove the cast from your image, however, If you have a "Colour Cast" on your slide, this will NOT be removed by the scanner. Scanner calibration will significantly improve your workflow and allow you to produce more consistent results.

Scanner Calibration Service

Our Scanner calibration Service includes both Flatbed and Film devices. The flatbed scanners are calibrated with a Gretag Macbeth "Reflective Target" in conjunction with their Spectrophotometer. The Film Scanners are calibrated with HCT Targets produced on either Kodak or Fuji films. We can produce Scanner ICC profiles for both Apple Mac and Windows operating systems, however we cannot produce profiles for Win 95 and Win NT as they don't support ICC profiles.

Cost £30.00 (Positive Film or Flatbed only), VAT exempt. Site visit required. (See our Travel Charge Page)

Stop Press!

If you have a combined flatbed and transparency scanner like the Epson 3200 or Agfa DuoScan for example, we are offering a special rate of £50.00 if you want both formats calibrating at the same time. A saving of £10!

Further Scanner Reading

Why can't Negative Film Scanners be Calibrated?

The process of calibrating a scanner requires the use of a precision Target. Nobody produces Colour Negative Targets, because the orange mask on negatives varies so much with exposure that, even if someone did make negative targets, they'd only work if your negatives were exposed the same way as the target.

Choice of Scanner Target

We use the new HutchColor HCT target for creating ICC scanner profiles on high D max scanners. Designed for extremely demanding users, it has around twice as many patches as IT8.7/1 & 2 (‘IT8’) targets, a better sampling of dark colours and almost three times as many gray scale steps. These features, combined with the fact that each HCT is individually-measured, help it characterise a scanners performance more accurately, especially in high density value.

When we are calibrating most Flatbed scanners we tend to use the Gretag Macbeth targets as they are less prone to flare than IT8 targets. Flare is common in flatbed scanners. We always use HCT targets for "High End" flatbed scanners.