Create ICC Profile for Negative film

Question

Hello i am looking for simple way to scan film negatives in a reproducable manner. I want to be able to judge and compare my exposures across films.I own an Epson v550 and after fiddeling around with EpsonScan, Silverfast, VueScan, ColorPerfect and negfix8 i came to the conclusion, that i can get good results and good looking images but on the other hand every software does some kind of coloradjustments wich are decided on a by-picture-rule. So all the pictures get colorgraded with different values and you can only give a hint(by choosing a film type) in wich direction the colorgrading should go. The other end of the line would be scan raw, invert and edit myself. But this seems as a bad starting point for editing, because at first i have to get rid of filmtint and apply my own subjectiv color grading. So my idea was:

• take a photograph of an it8 target under controlled light conditions with perfect exposure for middle grey on every filmroll(assuming imperfections in C-41 development) or at best for every filmtype.
• create an icc film profile with vuescan with these negatives.
• Get agnostic scans with no colorshift or software biases and with the colors as the film manufacturer intended.

I cannot test this by myself without buying vuescan and some it8 targets so i wanted to ask beforehand if somebody has more experience and can answere me the following questions:

1. Has this already been done and i can download filmtype profiles somewhere? If not, why not and whats the problem i dont see?

2. How are the scanned images going to look like? Will they look flat and will it be harder to achieve a good look of the image by editing? My thinking is, that it will not give me the perfect image but a good startingpoint for editing.

3. Will this destroy the look of the film because all films will look the same after profiling?

4. Is there a better way to get reproducable and accurate scans?

I dont want to delete the "film" from Filmphotography, because then i could just shoot digital. But i want to be able to compare my results.

Answer 1

In case you are interested. I have created a workflow and code to create ICC profiles for color negatives. It is intended to be used with digital cameras but could be adapted to scanners as well. See code here: https://github.com/arufahc/negicc

Answer 2

The other end of the line would be scan raw, invert and edit myself. But this seems as a bad starting point for editing, because at first i have to get rid of film tint and apply my own subjective color grading.

You mention the Photoshop plug-in ColorPerfect. They accept linear scan data as one of their input modes, which deals with the inversion and color tint issue very well, in my experience. A linear scan is comparable to "raw" data from a digital camera but not identical. You need a scanning program capable of producing a linear TIFF file. Both ViewScan and SilverFast can do this.

Once opened in ColorPerfect (set the L/G selection in the Start box to L), you then check the film type to get as close as possible using their supplied "FilmType" values.

See CP's explanation about how to create linear scans. On the right-hand side, they have a list of instructions for creating them with all of the different scanning software you mention (although note that EpsonScan cannot produce a true linear file so much as approximate one).