Thanks, forgot what they were called. Maybe the state of the art has moved in the ~10 years since I got out, or it's just the part of it I was in (fine art, pri

Thanks, forgot what they were called. Maybe the state of the art has moved in the ~10 years since I got out, or it's just the part of it I was in (fine art, prints for the magazine to reproduce (also forgot what those were called...)), but correcting to a color checker was manual and usually inexact anyway so I'd cue off of the grey and whatever thing in the image had a tone we'd have a strong expectation of how it should look (again, usually skin). As you quote they get used in archiving but those also tend to be done under well-characterized lighting and if not, it's something that's worth spending the time to tweak every little thing. It's a long shot from being able to apply automatic perspective and grey-point corrections plus a little bit of tweaking so the colors look "right" (or as right as possible under the wonky spectral distributions of most lights these days). I did manage to convince the company to buy the transparency so we could calibrate the film scanner's output.