This little thread is for Gil Russell, who already years ago, way back in the days of Papermodelers.net, pointed out that I should do something like what I now finally have found it necessary to attempt - calibrate the whole chain from scanner, over screen, to printer - and do it by iteration until the result was acceptable.
Those of you who may have followed the build log of the DHC-1 Chipmunk know that I ran into
serious trouble scanning the original printed kit. Scans which looked good in the scanning preview, and good enough in Photoshop, when printed turned out to be overlaid with a kind of greyish hue, making the colors look as if they were seen under an inch of dirty dishwater.
Not good.
I solved it temporarily by turning up the brightness in Photoshop, and was satisfied enough with the prints produced to build the model. But fundamentally this was a deeply unsatisfactory situation. There must be a way, I thought, to calibrate scanner and printer so that the prints looked like they did on the screen, and the scanner produced a scan which, when printed, looked like it did on the screen.
If you are very eager to know just the advice I could give after trying to solve this problem for myself, jump to
the end and summary of this introductory tale. What follows now is a perhaps rather lengthy description of the crooked road i took to get there…
My starting point thus was that I was satisfied with what the screen looked like, and it seemed logical to start with how to make the printer print what the screen showed. (As it turned out, this was a faulty supposition, but more of that later, in the order I came to understand it.)
For testing, I made up a simple little test print sheet. (The size of it is 210 x 81 mm, which corresponds to the surplus paper strips I get when making my long sheets, "L3" 420 x 216 mm, from regular A3.)
The test sheet contains standard color samples gracefully
provided by Rubén Andres in his recent magnificent redrawing of the Ford Trimotor, and a couple of typical model parts from a downloaded model. Since all details are downloaded, the goal most be that the print-out of them should look as close as possible to what they look like on the screen.