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 on your image, making its subsequent removal in Photoshop very difficult at times. Scanner calibration will remove the cast from your image, however, If you have a Colour Cast on your slide, this will NOT be removed by the scanner calibration. 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 an X-Rite Reflective Target and 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's and PC's.
Cost £30.00 (Positive Film or Flatbed only), VAT exempt. Site visit required. (See Travel Guide above)
For Combined Flatbed and Transparency scanners, the charge is £50.00 when calibrated together.

Why scanner calibration is not possible for Negative film?

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, they'd only work if your negatives were exposed the same way as the target. We use the 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 or 2 targets, a better sampling of dark colours and almost three times as many grey scale steps. These features, combined with the fact that each HCT target is individually measured, help it characterise a scanners performance more accurately, especially when the scanner has a high D Max.