Color Management for Scanners

[sue-jim]

I've seen posts where people ask how to get good scans - usually because the colors don't look like the original. At the time I thought my scanner was doing okay -- but I've noticed that if a painting has a lot of blue or purple or a bluish red, I have major problems (it's a relatively new Canon 4200 scanner in good shape). The blues turn purple, the purple looks VERY purple, and the reds lack the blue (they look like Cadmium Red between medium & light, instead of Alizarin Crimson, for example). Surely there must be a way to deal with this at the scanner level, rather than trying to adjust the color balance in a graphics program. Any computer experts here? As you might have guessed, I'm somewhat of a computer dummy even though I've been using them for years. Sue

[mreas]

I recalibrate my Canon scanner for almost every new scan, but especially if I'm changing from transparent to opaque watercolor or if the new piece has a different white level than the last. It's under image settings on the advanced mode of the ScanGear software. You can also adjust brightness, contrast, color, etc. there. I also have to allow for the difference in monitors. I work with three different monitors and they all display images differently. Some colors have always been problematic. Even back in the old days of color separations for printing, certain reds used in illustrations would always behave strangely in scans.