While scanning various colour negatives using Vuescan, I became frustrated
by the lack of colour saturation when using Adobe RGB and (believe it or
not) sRGB as the colour space. I found that if I scan using Colormatch
RGB then open the file in Photoshop *without* doing a profile conversion
(and yes, I know this is "against the rules"), the colours end up much closer
to the correct saturation and requires a lot less mucking around. My only
frustration with this is that reds seem to behave strangely. Any area of
pure red seems to become far too saturated, and it's very difficult to bring
this back into line without mucking up all the other colours. Any bright
red tends to end up looking like a cherry red (slightly bluish, not orange-red),
and way out of balance with the rest of the image.
Other people have said they use Colormatch RGB as a matter of course - but
I don't think I would, due to this behaviour. Has anyone else experienced
this issue? I don't use Colormatch RGB with slides - slide colour saturation
tends to be fine. It's colour negatives which are the issue, and I've found
the lack of saturation in Vuescan output from negs to be odd from the first
version I used.
What I'll probably have to do is use Adobe RGB and spend more time tweaking
the results, but Colormatch seemed to have a lot of potential judging by
my experience and the comments of others on this list.
Anyone like to make any comments?
Rob
PS sRGB output is quite workable, but I've been loathe to use it since everyone
here and in the epson list pan the idea of using a narrow gamut colour space.
Rob Geraghty harper@wordweb.com
