[GBrown]

Hi all;
Thanx for the links to the various discussions. It's all been useful in some way or other. Although I've read so much stuff on color management of digital images lately it's all starting to blur together. After banging my head against the wall for about two weeks I decided to start over and slowly walk through my workflow in an attempt to get better color.
One thing puzzled me - why were the ICC profiles NOT showing up for my printer? Well, after verifying and repairing the disk permissions, and booting from my Tiger DVD and repairing the disk, viola! Everything showed up, including three different paper profiles. There must have been some problem originally... which has basically lasted a year.
Okay, I understand that monitor calibration is important - I know that an expert or a piece of calibration hardware could do a better job than me, but I don't think it's too far off. I am using all the recommended settings (gamma 2.2, 6500K white balance, etc.) that I've read about so I'm as prepared as I can get on the display side.
The images I am working with are the negatives that my wedding photographer provided along with her book of proofs. So, I fortunately have a whole book of 4x6 prints which were done a local photo place and provide my baseline comparison for anything I'm looking at either on the monitor or printed off.
So, next I fired up the CanoScan 8400F, and after a warm-up period previewed the single image I wanted to work with. The Canon software/scanner driver allows for a lot of image adjustment prior to the creation of a JPEG/TIFF file (I'm using TIFF), something akin to what working with RAW data is I imagine.
After selecting the crop area of the 35 mm negative (ISO 200 Fuji film), I can go into the driver Preferences and make changes to Color Management. There are three major options:
1) Recommended Color Management
2) Manually Adjusted Color Management
3) No Color Management
I scanned the file multiple times and simply viewed the resulting TIFF file in Preview. No iPhoto, Aperture, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, etc. I started with Option 3, then Option 1, and then started changing the menu selections in Option 2. The way it works is you select the Source (I picked CanoScan 8400F Negative) and Target Profiles. The Target varied from my recent iMac monitor calibration Profile, Adobe 1998 RGB Profile, sRGB Profile, and HP Advanced Photo Paper Profile.
After a half-dozen scans compared literally side-by-side-by-side, I discovered a few things. The first scan, No Color Management, was the best. Everything else was slightly-to-very overexposed and slightly-to-much-too red. So, in an effort to understand why, I started bringing the profiles up in Comparison view in ColorSync. What I noticed was the Target profile, the scanner Negative profile, was a very small gamut.
In comparison with others, for example the Adobe 1998 RGB gamut, it was literally coming up way short on the red end and particularly on the green end. In comparison to my calibrated monitor profile, it wasn't that bad actually. But the real eye-opener was how this seemingly small gamut compared to the gamuts for the three HP paper Profiles. The paper profile color gamuts were even smaller, all three of them. Much smaller.
(I tried a few prints off the "best" image, using various options for the HP Photo Paper. They all turned out crap - way to red and light. The quality looked just like the Aperture prints I got a few weeks ago before I abandoned it, so there's a clue.)
My interpretation of the literature, data and online discussions is that the scanner is incapable of recognizing colors outside of the gamut I'm selecting. Worse, the printer I've got is capable of even less color. Now, I know ColorSync is supposed to compensate for those limitations. Basically, where I left off last night was I think I need to change the compensation method between color profile gamuts. I read a week ago what the three or four types of compensation are, but they escape me at the moment. It was all very technical.
My question for the Macworld community is this - is it possible to manually manage that compensation method? My current theory is that it's on the wrong setting. Instead of colors being interpolated or adjusted, they're simply getting cut off or averaged or something.
One thing I'd like to do is put these images online for people to look at so they can see (I hope) what I've been working and playing around with. I'll investigate flickr later today.
G.B.

[Philbert]

You're going about this the wrong way as simply trying a bunch of different settings and hoping for the best is NOT the way to get color management working.

First of all - stay out of ColorSync - it's just confusing things even more. While ColorSync works in the background to tie it all together, there's no reason to ever open the app unless you really know what you're doing.

Secondly, don't use Apple's Preview app. While I think Preview is a color managed application, the color management features won't be as robust as the professional applications you have. You have Aperture, Lightroom and Photoshop Elements and you're checking images in Preview? Why? (And you can get perfectly fine prints out of Aperture!)

For color management to work:
You need a calibrated monitor (which, as you say is probably close enough - I'd say not your problem)
You need a profiled scanner
You need a paper profile for the paper you're using in your particular printer
Finally (and this is your real problem), you need to be able to set it all up correctly

In theory, it works like this -

Your profiled scanner sends the scan (whose preview appears correct on your profiled monitor), to the target working space of the app (Adobe RGB 1998) they'll be opened in. The scanner preview should NOT look different after the scan is opened in your editing application. If the scan preview looks bad, so will the resulting scan and print.

If your scans are junk from the get go, that's where you need to start. I'm not familiar with Canon scanners but there should be preferences to tell it what monitor profile you're using, the source (scanner) profile, and the target profile it's headed to which would be the working space you're using (Adobe 1998). Of course, you also need to tell it which film is being scanned and whether positive or negative film. Keep in mind too that not all scanners handle color neg film very well.

If you want these images on the web, you need convert them to sRGB after the scans are made.

I realize your head is about to explode - color management is a fairly complex subject to understand (and explain), but hang in there.

-phil