Brenda,
I have to agree with Barbara and Brett on the soft proofing. I wish Elements had soft proofing but it doesn’t. But you can get along quite well without it unless you’re doing the type of work Barbara described and if you’re doing that, you should consider using Photoshop.
I have to agree with Brett on using different scanning software. I did a little research and it appears that you cannot use a custom calibrated profile with your Dimage scanner software. You can have the software convert to a standard Adobe RGB colorspace by setting the profile in the color matching section of the preferences dialog. However, that will use the default scanner profiles for the conversion and not your calibrated profile.
Software such as VueScan and Silverfast can use your calibrated profile and output to the Adobe RGB color space for use with Elements or Photoshop. That may be your best bet. Silverfast has an excellant reputation — be careful: the SE version says it uses your native scanner driver and profile which implies that it won’t give you the custom profile capability since your driver doesn’t support that. That could force you into the more expensive version. I’m not that familiar with VueScan but it supports your scanner, can do the job also, and is less expensive — you’ll want the professional version. It’s shareware while Silverfast is commercial and Vuescan probably isn’t as feature complete. But, it may be entirely satisfactory for your needs. You’ll need to campare features and decide. You might want to look at a few reviews or even download VueScan and try it free at
http://www.hamrick.com before you choose. Does anyone reading this and using VueScan care to comment?
Regarding seeing the "correct" colors. Full color management will use the embedded profile which is exactly what you want to do. The whole point of embedding a profile is to tell color managed applications using the image how the color values are to be interpreted. Without an embedded profile or color space indicator, the industry standard is to treat the image as if it were in sRGB. If all the device profiles are accurate, the colors you see should be a very good match. Just remember, every device differs in what it can record or reproduce and your monitor probably has a smaller gamut than either your scanner or printer.
Bob
