[Hugh Sakols Silver Member Posts: 80]

Film and Photo Digitizing

on: February 11, 2021 at 11:18 pm

I just made a number of uncompressed .tiff scans from my Minolta Multi Pro.  Unfortunately, I noticed that all my scans are in sRGB.  Do I need rescan in ProPhoto or can I just assign the working space in Adobe Photoshop?  I rescanned one of the images in ProPhoto and could see no difference.

[Daniel Koretz Participant Posts: 87]

Re: Do I need to rescan?

Reply #1 on: February 12, 2021 at 11:00 am

Whether it matters in this case is an empirical question. However, you can’t recreate data you’ve lost. Once something is reduced to the sRGB color space, you have lost (actually, remapped) all of the colors that lie outside of that gamut but within larger color spaces such as ProPhoto. Assigning ProPhoto as the working space after the fact won’t regenerate the colors you have lost–if you have lost any. If a pixel has been remapped to a value inside sRGB, Photoshop has no way of knowing which of the values outside of sRGB it had originally.

The best rule of thumb, IMHO, is never throw out data until you have to.

[Hugh Sakols Silver Member Posts: 80]

Re: Do I need to rescan?

Reply #2 on: February 12, 2021 at 6:26 pm

Thank you.  I went ahead a rescanned them.  Yes, scan once.  For these files, it probably would have made little if no difference.

 

[Andrew Rodney Participant Posts: 416]

Re: Do I need to rescan?

Reply #3 on: February 13, 2021 at 5:13 pm

The short answer is, if you want to scan colors that may be in the originals and fall outside sRGB (and that’s not at all rare), YES.

Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management" (pluralsight.com)”

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