Portra 160 NC & Imacon 848: Satisfactory color?

[thompsonkirk]

I'd been scanning Portra NC 160 on a flatbed scanner, but today tried some scans with an Imacon 848.  My intention was to do minimal processing in FlexColor – I thought the Portra profile would yield good results for later processing if I just set the histogram correctly & then did my post-processing later in LR/PS. 

But the Portra profile didn't seem accurate enough to allow such a simple treatment.  The color was less accurate than my flatbed scans.  I was especially bothered by overwhelming greens, when other colors came close to what I expected.  I had trouble correcting them, either in the FlexColor or later with PS.  The scanner's owner checked me out, & we saw no incorrect settings. 

--Have others seen color anomalies with this combination of film & scanner profile? 

--I didn't have time to check & see: does the FlexColor RGB Standard profile perhaps give better results with Portra 160 NC?

(Other than this color problem, I was a happy scanner.  With sharpening/texture set at -120, the images looked much clearer than flatbed scans, yet didn't have the over-sharpness of FlexColor's default sharpening.  In this respect  they looked very 'photographic' to my eyes, which are still calibrated to 20th-century photo norms.)

Kirk

[lowep]

Not sure if it is relevant but you may like to compare your results with these that were mostly shot with Portra 160 4x5 sheet film, scanned as 3F files with the Portra 160 profile on an Imacon Precision II scanner and adjusted in Photoshop - though maybe hard to deduce anything from such small jpgs.

My experience is that 3F scans of 4x5 negs provide a great starting point but require a lot of adjustments to get the image to look how I want.

If you do find a way that you can just press the scanner button and everything comes out perfect that would be great 

[Alan Klein]

Although I shot Portra 160VC no NC, my Epson V600 flat bed with Auto color set produces pretty good color with 120 medium format.  If I can figure out how to do it, I'll post a picture.

[OmerYair]

I've had similar experience too with Portra 160NC and 400NC. Scanning with Epson V700 yeilded good color reproduction, especialy in dark areas where Imacon lost most of the color data and had a tendacy for green/red cast.