> … but would not bet real money that the colors I'm displaying are close to real life… You can get there if you have an accurate color profile for your camera

> … but would not bet real money that the colors I'm displaying are close to real life… You can get there if you have an accurate color profile for your camera and an accurate color profile for your monitor. > So for this article, I don't see mathematical proof that the negatives have been inverted accurately, regardless of method, even though I'm sure the results are great. I suspect it comes down to subjective impression. People who work with negatives generally just don’t give a shit about “accurate”. If you care about accurate colors, then maybe you would be shooting color positive film instead, or digital. It is generally accepted that a part of the process of shooting negatives is to make subjective decisions about color, after you develop the film. That’s not to say that you can’t get accurate colors using negatives. It’s a physical process that records color, and you can make color profiles for negatives. > For scanning color negatives, the brand of film would be mapped to a colorspace, the light source would have its own colorspace, the two would get multiplied together somehow, and the result would be stored in linear RGB. Inversion would be linear. Then the output linear RGB would get mapped to the display's sRGB or whatever. What you would do is store a color profile in the image. You can use linear RGB for storing images, but it’s wasteful. Linear RGB makes poor use of the encoding range. If you care about correct colors, you can just embed a color profile in the image. It’s easy, and it’s supported by image editors. You just have to go through the tedious process of creating a color profile in the first place, which normally requires colorimetry equipment. There’s no reason inversion must be linear. The response curve of negative film is, well, a curve. It is not a line. When you shoot negative film and print to paper, the paper has a response curve, too. The light source does not have a color space. It is just a single color—that’s not really a “space” of colors. It has a spectrum, and the spectrum of light from the light source, combined with the spectral response curve of the dyes in the film, combined with the spectral response curve of your sensor, produces some kind of result which you can combine into a single color profile for the entire process. And you can combine that with the spectral response of the film layers. You can just create a color profile for the entire process—shoot a bunch of test targets under controlled lighting conditions, develop, scan, and then measure the RGB values you get for those test targets. You use test targets with known colors that you buy from the store.