Hi @MarionGaff1 - whatever your scanner software or user manual might be telling you, there’s no embedded ICC profile in any of the various scan files labelled with and without profiles, at least not in the ones that I’ve downloaded and checked, that had file names indicating there was a profile embedded.
You might want to open one supposedly with, and one without a profile embedded by the scanner - both scanned without repositioning the target or opening the window, etc - and calculate the “difference” which should be zero for all pixels. Visually there doesn’t seem to be any difference. Imagemagick does allow this “difference” operation from the command line. Example imagemagick commands can be found here: https://ninedegreesbelow.com/photography/lcms2-unbounded-mode.html - but that’s an old article, perhaps syntax has changed in the meantime. Don’t bother reading the text unless you just happen to want to, just locate the sample imagemagick commands. Or ask @afre or @snibgo for the syntax.
When using command line tools such as exiftool or ArgyllCMS to examine metadata for example to see if there’s any embedded ICC profile), life is hugely simpler if file names don’t have any spaces - use underscores or hyphens instead of spaces.
Doing a quick check, the darkest patches of a scan of the target chart with the white background are consistently a bit lighter compared to a scan with the dark background. But the Lab Lightness difference is less than one. Of course comparing two scanned files in such a slapdash fashion isn’t worth much from a statistical perspective so I’ll leave it to you to do further experimenting, or else just use the black background. You might also want to experiment to see what difference using a blue vs a black background for the orange peels might make in terms of possibly scattered light.
You are absolutely right. Software needs an embedded ICC profile to properly interpret the colors:
- First scan the target chart.
- Then use ArgyllCMS to make the scanner input profile. ArgyllCMS profile-making utilities don’t need an input profile.
- Then use Imagemagick or GIMP or other command line utility or image editing software to embed the scanner input profile into the scan of the target chart and also embed the input profile into all the scans of the orange peels and anything else you might need to scan.
Here’s a sample command to use exiftool to embed an ICC profile:
exiftool "-icc_profile<=/path/to/your/scanner-profile.icc" /path/to/your/scanned-target.tif
So after you make the input profile, if the scanner profile is named “scanner-profile.icc” and the scan of the target chart is named “scanned-target.tif”, and both are in the same folder, then cd to the folder and type this:
exiftool "-icc_profile<=scanner-profile.icc" scanned-target.tif
And the usual warning: Any time someone hands you a command to type into a terminal, test, test, test and test again to verify that the command is working as expected. Even with trustworthy sources of such commands, typos happen, people forget the right syntax, and syntax does vary from one OS to the next. I don’t know Windows or Mac syntax. I only know Linux syntax.
Here’s the exiftool web page: https://sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
There’s an exiftool forum for asking about syntax and such.
ImageMagick, LCMS, ArgyllCMS, and no doubt quite a few other softwares all have utilities for embedding ICC profiles at the command line. Exiftool isn’t the only option.
Well, that’s all the typing I want to do for now. My apologies for running out of steam before uploading the scanner profile and sample commands 