Profiling a Microtek i900 not working

[davidh202]

  I have spent some of two days and a couple of hours with Microtek support trying to profile and calibrate the scanner from IT8 targets using the propriatery ICC profiler and the CMS  on a Win7 and NEC PA241W calibrated with Spectraview.
  The problem is the profiler goes through all the steps but never finalizes (saves), the output profile to the Windoze ICC list in ....Drivers-Color.
I cannot even get the profiler to put a profile anywhere else (ie desktop) so I can install it from there.
The support tech e mailed me a created profile today and it installed without a hitch, and also showed up in the Scanmaker settings choices which is what I have been trying to accomplish all along.
According to the tech guy I have a conflict somewhere in my system that is blocking the profiler from completing its task.
I never had this problem when the scanner was on my XP system. I do have all the latest win7  64 bit compatable drivers.
Is it possible it could be Spectraview that is causing an issue? I'm at a total loss as to where to begin to look.  I had originally purchased the scanner to transform my Kodachromes to digital, long before I realized what I was getting myself into
I  now use the scanner infrequently, should I just accept it's output without calibrating, and do any necessary correcting in PS?
Has anyone had a similar issue?

BTW: Kudos to Microtek support. Started with E-mails and escalated to phone service. They were very professional despite the fact that we couldn't go much deeper to find the root problem.

[Mark D Segal]

If you haven't done so yet, you may wish to download a demo of the version of SilverFast with IT8 (http://www.silverfast.com/show/scanners-microtek/en.html) and buy their bespoke IT8 target for that scanner and Kodachrome. It is a one button-push operation to profile your scanner with their system, and the profile should load seamlessly into SilverFast's colour management system when you select Kodachrome as the scan media. All happens under the hood - or should. If this works, your problem would be solved without further ado.

I definitely recommend that you profile the scanner - it will save you oodles of time adjusting the tone and colour or images. I doubt very much that Spectraview has anything to do with the problem you have been having.

[degrub]

sounds like a win7 UAC issue. Basically, the program does not have rights to write a file out into a specific folder. SO it just sits there.
There are a couple things to try:
you can go into the program folder holding the exe and right click on the file, select properties, there should be an option for "run as admin". There also is an option under advanced (IIRC) to set it for "all users" for the program to run as admin.

It usually stems from how the program was installed. If you remove everything Microtek and run the installer, chose to run it as admin. That may clear it up. If not you will have to dig for all the executables and change them to run as admin as above.

There is a way to disable UAC, but i would not recommend it unless there is no other way to run the program. The above should work.

[Mark D Segal]

David, if as "degrub" says the problem is in your operating system, then what I was suggesting is not where to fo first. So I suggest you do as he recommended first.

That said, I doubt very much the existence of two scan programs on the same drive matters to this or most other scanning issues. It's not impossible - there are documented cases - but it's not usual or likely.

If you already own a SilverFast license, and if the version you have is Auto IT8 enabled, you don't need to spend any money except perhaps for the bar-coded IT8 target. But if the targets you have bear the name SilverFast and have a barcode on them, you don't need to buy anything. If the version you have does not have AUto IT8 capability, they do offer an upgrade price, which only you can calculate on their website, because you need to enter your serial number in a pane on the upgrade page for your scanner model in order to see the price.

BTW, what the program allows you to load for purposes of creating a custom profile is the reference file for the target. The scanner reads your target, then the program compares the read numbers with the numbers in the bespoke reference file and calculates the profile from that comparison. Then it should load the profile automatically when you use SilverFast. That seems to be where your problem is and could well be an OS issue unrelated to scan software per se.

Because you have a scanner with bundled SilverFast software, you MAY be entitled to tech support from LaserSoft Imaging. No harm trying.

[Mark D Segal]

Definitely not. Profiling a printer through a scanner is not a good idea. You'd be better off getting a custom profile for the printer if the canned profiles are not adequate. All you need from SilverFast is (1) ability to run your scanner; (2) their iSRD clean-up tool is excellent and a huge time-saver if your scanner supports infrared; (3) IT8 Auto profiling. Whatever of their versions for your scanner gives you those three things should be fine.

[Mark D Segal]

Mark,

 I just got finished profiling the old Silverfast version with my existing IT8 Targets and it went very smooth and quick.
Since that worked fine, I Uninstalled all the Microtek software and reloaded all the new drivers from their site again thinking I might get lucky this time....NOT!
 I guess I will just stick with the existing Silverfast and upgrade it in eventually.
Too bad, I just missed out on an upgrade offer they had last month,but I'm sure they will do it again.
Since my Reflective and Pos Film IT8 targets are working with Silverfast I may just purchase their Kodachrome IT8 and see how far I get with printing some of my better old KR images   
The only thing I will loose is the Digital ICE which doesn't work with the Silverfast, but I do recall it wasn't all that great to begin with

Once again a big thank you,
David

You are welcome. Glad it worked out.

Yes, it is worthwhile buying the Kodachrome target. In fact, these things are going to become rare commodities one of these days because they can't be manufactured any longer. There is no Kodachrome and no Kodachrome development service available any where. Kodachrome causes a different enough colour response in a scanner that it is definitely worth profiling for. You could use a SilverFast canned profile for that scanner, but if that model has shown significant unit to unit variation of colour rendition (I don't know factually whether it has), your own custom profile would be preferred.

ICE is not officially supported for Kodachrome anyhow. You can use SilverFast's SRD tool, but it is less automatic than their iSRD (much better than ICE, but needs an infrared channel that your scanner does not support). 

[Mark D Segal]

Sure, but it's so time-consuming and boring. I don't know what value you put on your time, but if you really have a very large number of slides you want to scan, you may want to think of up-grading to a bespoke film scanner which has an infrared channel that SilverFast supports and use it with iSRD. It will just save you oodles of time and boredom. Have a look at my review of the Plustek 7600i (packaged with SilverFast Ai6 IT8) on this website. It's a really decent scanner and software package for the price. But if you're just doing this periodically a few slides at a time, the CS5 way is probably the most practical for you.