At this time, we do not offer a stand-alone solution to profile your scanner. Why would that be?

Well, of course part one of the answer is that our current suppliers of colour management products do not yet offer a solution for scanner profiling (although some of the Gretag Macbeth Eye-One bundles have scanner profiling capability built-in).

But, there is slightly more to it than that.

Scanners are not the most consistent tools to measure colour! Within the space of a few minutes, a scanner’s colour response may change dramatically - often based around the temperature of the light source or the sensor. Other factors may be the type and age of the sensor, and the reaction of the material being scanned to the light source (for example, some papers are potentially tougher to scan than others as they contain brighteners). Some materials also suffer from metamerism, and the light source in many scanners may give results that are quite different from the appearance of an item in daylight. And these are just the factors that apply within the scanner! We also have other issues, like for example; what is the colour accuracy of a piece of Provia slide film? Well, it may look great as a slide, but it is not in itself colour accurate, and representing ‘reality’. And even if it did when processed correctly, what if the chemicals were off? What about the mask of negative films? What about, changing the ‘exposure’ of the scan? That too can change the response curve of a scanner, so to use a profile effectively, you do need to set your end points to account for all possible scan formats... and then keep that fixed.

All of these factors together could be considered to make a scanner profile of tenuous use to you... and we would argue that what is far more important is still the accuracy of your monitor, and your ability to have that output in a colour managed manner.

We would welcome feedback from users of profiled scanners of their experiences. We’re not saying that attempting to profile a scanner is wrong... but just that the rewards may not be as great as you might expect; perhaps especially at the cheaper end of the flatbed scanner market. As with any area of colour management, when you delve into this subject, you will find many intricacies of which we have highlighted a few... ‘fixes’ for some of them... and we do not doubt, a good few people who express an entirely opposite viewpoint.

Based on our arguments above, we can think of only one case where really accurate colour management on input is really vital; that of historic art reproduction. We also hear that, in this scenario, the new thought process is that a scan is NOT enough! Yes, even in art reproduction circles, they are now (apparently) those that say a scan is not good enough. There are projects that are involved in using Spectrophotometer data to read individual and tiny areas of a work of art to assess it’s full colour response curve. This gives important additional information not present in a scan; for example a hint at what colourant the artist used to create that particular colour at that location on the image!

Please note that MWORDS has closed. We aim to retain these support pages in the hope that they may benefit our past customers, but regret that we can no longer offer further comment or support in relation to the information above.