Hello,
I am using for 35mm a Nikon Coolscan 4000. Are there any expierience scanning negatives as positives in Nikon Scan and then converted in NLP?
For medium format I use an Epson and the Workflow in Epson Scan for NLP works fine.
Which settings are useful in Nikon Scan for a nice conversion in Negative Lab Pro?
Thanks
Oliver
Any ideas?
Would be nice If someone already tried Nikon Scan.
Hi @Olli99,
I donât have any direct experience with NikonScan, but I have chatted with a number of users who do, and can provide a few tips.
First, I understand that NikonScan has the ability to scan to .NEF files, but my understanding is that Lightroom canât really interpret these properly, so you are probably better off sticking to TIFF for use with Negative Lab Pro.
Second, itâs recommended that you set the gamma to 2.2 for the scan.
Third, at least in the examples Iâve been sent that were produced with NikonScan, I get the best results starting off with the âLinear + Gammaâ tone setting in Negative Lab Pro. And in some cases, you may have to make significant adjustments to âbrightness.â
I hope to do a deeper dive of Nikon Scan in the future, but in the meantime, hopefully other users can jump in and offer tips!
Hope that helps!
-Nate
Thank you for your explanation. I tried some negatives now with Nikon Scan but it wonât satisfied me.
Now I give Vuescan a try but there is one problem:
I scan the RAW DNG like in the tutorial. After converting I see the NLP camera profile. The problem is now that my conversions have a strong orange/red cast. In film type neutral or cooling it is most of the time ok but not perfect. Warming, Standard, Kodak or Fuji have a very strong orange/red cast and are almost useless.
I tried scanning this negatives with my digital camera and there it works fine (but without ICE 
)
I am using Vuescan 9.6.47 and a Nikon Coolscan 4000.
Hope you can help me
Olli
Does anyone have an idea?
Hi!
In Vuescan in the input panel, are you scanning in âimageâ mode or ânegativeâ mode? The ânegativeâ mode changes the gain of each of the color channels, and I believe the Coolscan 4000 can independently control this on the hardware side, so if you are consistently seeing strong orange casts, itâs possible something has gone wrong there.
If you send me a few raw images I can take a look.
Your histogram of the negative should look something like thisâŚ
âŚwith the color channels separate and red on the furthest right area.
If you see that the the histogram is further to the right than the fourth quadrant on the right, it can be helpful to lower the exposure prior to conversion so that everything is to the left of fourth quadrant. Like thisâŚ
And then try the conversion.
Iâm finding that Lightroomâs highlight compression can particularly screw things up with Vuescan DNGs.
-Nate
Hello Nate,
I sent you a Dropbox Link. Did you receive it?
Olli
I feel foolish asking this question, but could you tell me how to set the gamma to 2.2 in Vuescan? Is this the same as setting my brightness to 2.2?
Is there any consensus about whats the best workflow to use a Coolscan with NLP?
Vuescan, Silverfast or Nikonscan? Which one does best with scanning as positives and converting in LR?
Reviving this thread! Iâm a devoted Nikon Scan user, both with and without NLP. For reference iâm using an Nikon LS-50 and LS-5000. I tried Vuescan + NLP for a bit, but found that vuescanâs infrared clean isnât nearly as good as the official Digital ICE in Nikon Scan, and i also get a lot of grain with 35mm scans in vuescan. like a whole lot more than Nikon Scan. My method is this: Scan in positive mode, 16 bit TIFF output, color management on, Adobe RGB color profile, normal ICE. All other settings disabled. Thatâs it. the color management and Adobe RGB gets you a 2.2 gamma, so no extra TIFF processing in NLP is needed before doing the conversion. Never tried the raw NEF format, because iâm not even really sure what it does in Nikon Scan.
Iâve done Nikon Scan in negative mode as well, and it works most of the time, but sometimes the colors are weird. NLP gives me better color results.
Iâd love to get feedback from @nate on if there are any downsides to this method.
just wondering, i am using a LS4000 and the problem is, that when i try to scan in positive mode (in nikonscan that is), the frames wonât align at all. i scans half frames, frames twice and so on, no way to properly scan negatives in positive mode.
did you manage to solve this?
i definitely get frame alignment mismatches more often in positive mode than in negative mode, but itâs more like a few millimeters out of alignment, to at its worst maybe half a frame. Itâs the sort of thing i can fix by looking at the thumbnail and making adjustments in the âboundary offsetâ value in the âfilm strip offsetâ menu under âscanner extrasâ. it doesnât need a full re-preview or anything because itâs just going off of thumbnails, and clicking âreload thumbnailâ after each adjustment gives me a look at how far it went. The quick thumbnail functionality just doesnât exist in any of the other scanning programs.
are you only scanning 6 frames at a time? i have a sa-21 converted to an sa-30 to scan a full roll of ilm at once and in positive mode the alignment is so far off after a few shots, that the boundary offsett value isnât big enough to compensate for it
oh yeah, all my film is old family photos from the 80s, and was snipped into 4 frame strips when it got developed. so iâm not dealing with whole rolls at a time. i can see how that error would accumulate over a whole roll. interested to hear how people handle that!
Hi,
Iâve recently started using Nikon Scan and NLP with my Coolscan 8000 instead of just scanning in negative mode.
I currently scanning the same as you with Gamma 2.2 but have color management turned off as I thought thats what I needed to do but will this be causing a problem? So far all my images have converted fine but I want to get the my settings right before I spend alot of time scanning all of my photos.
Thanks
i keep the color management on because thatâs the only way to have the color profile info included in the TIFF file, correct? otherwise itâs sort of a crapshoot how the colors will be interpreted. Doesnât apply when youâre digitizing with RAW files from a DSLR, but for a TIFF i would think youâd want to keep it on. Iâm not sure, i might be wrong on that.
i am rescanning all my 35mm color negatives now. In my test, tried linear gamma 1.0 tiff with silverfast and also nikon scan tiff and nef on gamma 1.0. All with color management off. No color profile embedded. Output files from scanner software seems to have diffferent colors(?). Anyways, i am back using Nikon Scan with my Coolscan V, 14bit, turned off color management, set gamma 1.0, using digital ICE and all adjustments turned off. Set Analog Gain to Green 1 and Blue 2, this gets rid of the filmbase orange color (makes it white), scan the complete scanarea without doing previews and save as NEF.
I noticed NEF gives better colors. Processed it in Photoshop with another program and hardly had to do any postprocessing on the colors, just did curves and contrast or some gamma exposure and i am done.
As test, I used the NEF file with NLP to compare but the colors were washed out and had to do adjustments. Anyone tried NLP with NEF files?
Update: with Linaer - Gamma and Kodak the results are better in NLP 
Update2: no longer saving NEF, but TIFF for more compatibility.
