Congratulation! You now have a scanner calibration target. Some important things you should keep in mind: - The ANSI IT 8.7/1 target is for use with the latest Fujichrome Velvia 100F and Astia 100F films. The target is not for use with older Astia or other film types. - This floppy or CD does contain the IT 8.7/1 reference file(s) for the calibration target charge "N040601". Make sure that the charge printed on your target slide frame does match the reference file. For instance, choose the file "N040601.txt" in your profiling software if the charge printed on the slide frame is "N040601". - Handle the targets carefully to avoid kink marks, scratches and fingerprints. Do not touch the surface. - Always protect the calibration target from strong light. - The colors of the target will change with time. It is recommended to get a new target after 2 years if you want to avoid any quality loss. Please check out http://www.targets.coloraid.de for the latest information on your charge. - You can use the calibration target with basicly any other proper IT 8.7/1 software on PC/Mac/Amiga/Sun and other systems. Check out http://www.coloraid.de for links to various free scanner profiling software and other CMS tools. - The color gamut of film is usualy larger than most output hardware can handle. Also not all scanner profiling programs can deal with large color gamuts of slide films equaly well. Highly saturated colors possible with film slides are sometimes not scanned or reproduced correctly. If you run into huge color faults with highly saturated colors, try to isolate the faulty color profile involved. It might be the output and not the scanner input profile used. In case the scanner profile is faulty, try a different profiling software that has been well tested with slide films. - The "Extras" directory does contain additional files for your target: N040601S.txt : A smaller version of the normal reference file not containing any statistical information on the target production, resulting in a smaller file. Use this reference file if your profiling software does crash when reading the larger file. For instance, a fault in some versions of the Heidelberg CPS ScanOpen software do cause a crash when reading the large reference file. There is no quality loss when using this smaller reference file as only statistical target production information has been removed from this file. N040601.eps : This file is for use with the X-Rite ColorShop program and does contain the spectral data of the target. Using the spectral data ColorShop is able to calculate a large number of color operations. Note that the file format only supports spectral data from 390 to 690nm. Tests indicate that the error introduced by this limitation is small (roughly dE 0.2). A demo version of the ColorShop software can be found on the X-Rite website: http://www.x-rite.com. For more information on the spectral data please read below. N040601.xls : A tab delimited file that loads nicely into the Excel spreadsheet program. The file contains the spectral data of the targets and various color values calculated from the spectral data. Please read below for more information about the spectral data. N040601.cgt : This file does contain the spectral data of the targets using the ANSI CGATS.5-1993 format. Despite being very similar to the IT 8.7 reference file, you should not use this file for generating scanner profiles unless noted differently. Some of the color data stored in this file may differ from the normal IT 8.7 reference file. Please read below for more information about the spectral data. N040601.cxf : This CxF formated file does contain the spectral data of the targets. The XML based CxF format is mainly used by newer Gretag - Macbeth soft- and hardware products. Eye-One Share (http://www.i1color.com/freeware), ProfileMakers MeasureTool and ColorLab (both available from http://www.gretagmacbeth.com) are programs available online at least as partly functional demo version and do allow loading/displaying the file. Differently to the ColorShop file format mentioned above, the CxF format does allow storing the complete spectral data. However, all CxF compatible programs mentioned seem to have limitations and do not make full use of the data similar to ColorShop. Usualy the data seems to be limited to 380-730nm. - The spectral data files provided in the "Extras" directory are currently mainly for use by experienced users and developers. Normal users intending to profile their scanners do not need these files. The files can mainly be used to calculate color data for different observers or color spaces. For instance, if you are used to work with density data than you can use X-Rites ColorShop to display the density values for each patch. - Measurement is based on wavelengths from 380-780nm in 3nm intervals and does meet the ISO 13655 standard. The 3nm data is interpolated to 10nm data according to ISO 13655:1996(E) Annex A. For batch average measured productions the spectral data available is the mean data of several targets measured. XYZ tristimulus and other color spaces calculated from the mean spectral data usualy do differ from the tristimulus values listed in the IT 8.7 reference file wich are based on the mean of the tristimulus values. Wolf Faust - wfaust@coloraid.de