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 donāt 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 canāt really interpret these properly, so you are probably better off sticking to TIFF for use with Negative Lab Pro.
Second, itās recommended that you set the gamma to 2.2 for the scan.
Third, at least in the examples Iāve been sent that were produced with NikonScan, I get the best results starting off with the āLinear + Gammaā tone setting in Negative Lab Pro. And in some cases, you may have to make significant adjustments to ābrightness.ā
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 wonāt 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 āimageā mode or ānegativeā mode? The ānegativeā 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, itās 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 thisā¦
ā¦with 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 thisā¦
And then try the conversion.
Iām finding that Lightroomās 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! Iām a devoted Nikon Scan user, both with and without NLP. For reference iām using an Nikon LS-50 and LS-5000. I tried Vuescan + NLP for a bit, but found that vuescanās infrared clean isnāt 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. Thatās 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 iām not even really sure what it does in Nikon Scan.
Iāve 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.
Iād 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 wonāt 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 itās more like a few millimeters out of alignment, to at its worst maybe half a frame. Itās the sort of thing i can fix by looking at the thumbnail and making adjustments in the āboundary offsetā value in the āfilm strip offsetā menu under āscanner extrasā. it doesnāt need a full re-preview or anything because itās just going off of thumbnails, and clicking āreload thumbnailā after each adjustment gives me a look at how far it went. The quick thumbnail functionality just doesnāt 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 isnāt 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 iām 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,
Iāve 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 thatās the only way to have the color profile info included in the TIFF file, correct? otherwise itās sort of a crapshoot how the colors will be interpreted. Doesnāt apply when youāre digitizing with RAW files from a DSLR, but for a TIFF i would think youād want to keep it on. Iām 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.
Just want to do a bit of a brain dump here as Iāve been on Nikon Scan with my 9000 since Snow Leopard was a new operating system and I guess I always will. My whole film archive is pretty much scanned like
Nikon Color Management: Off
Positive Mode
Equalise colour channels using analogue gain until they each are around 210 or so. (I make film-specific presets so I can get close fast)
A long long time ago I discovered that Nikon ship some fancy craft LUT colour profiles in Nikon Scan and Iāve long felt I could probably somehow leverage these to take advantage of whatever super science magic went into them. Iām sure the internal ānegative modeā on Nikon Scan uses them and that makes the BEST colours but is unfortunately too uncontrollable to ever really use.
Anyway, so all my scans are positive TIFFs with no profile like this. I used ColorPerfect a lot in the past. Iāve made my own positive ICC profiles from scanned pics of ColorChecker targets using LumaRiver and Iāve tried a bunch of āoff the shelf profilesā. For a long time my best bet was to invert in ColorPerfect or NLP and use my LumaRiver profile but it bugged me that this was a little unscientific and SOME colours in some images would be off. It was good in about 95% of cases.
Things I chased for a long time:
Recently I revisited doing manual inversions using Photoshop again. Something Iād played around with in the past but not been satisfied with. But these days, Iām finding really my best results and certainly colour, come from manual inversion using the Nikon_R profile and simple inversions and curves. Weirdly better colour.
OK. I know that wasnāt super focussed or specifically helpful. Iād love to get back to NLP because I like a more ādeterministicā workflow thatās more reproducible but just being frank about where I am in case it helps or resonates with anyone else.
Iāve been reading with interest a bunch of the various colour profile and colour theory threads and it strikes me that I donāt know what a āno Nikon Color Managementā TIFF really is. Before Iād assumed that it was like a RAW with the R G and B numbers indicating the sensor readings from each colour channel. But since learning that, e.g. there is no āpureā green visible to a human eye, Iām left wondering if it is really like that in the TIFF or if it is interpreted in an āsRGB-likeā way to āadapted to human vision but without SPECIFIC profileā ā if you know what I mean.
Iāve avoided the NEF output option all this time because it seems badly supported. But I also assumed the unprocessed TIFF was giving me basically the same thing. But maybe not? Frustrating. Because thatās exactly the starting point you want for an inversion, right? Maybe thatās what makes this game so hard! 
Just in case anyone wants to see what kind of colour and style I do (for context on all these remarks) Iāve also had a Flickr for like ages and Iām fairly OCD on Albums so I have a ColorPerfect album, an NLP album, a Manual Inversion album etc in case you want to compare. Iām just āsamagnewā on Flickr Sam Agnew | Flickr
Stay awesome, Nikon Scanner friend!
Sam
P.S. Like 12 years ago I documented my actual raw film scan methodology. Nothing really has changed apart from I now go 1.8 on the gamma instead of 1.0. Again, that was trial and error really Scanning Colour Negative Film 101 | smashandgrabphoto
The beauty of current colour modelling is, that it is independent of human vision even though it played a role in creating the models in the first place. Mathematically, all colours can e represented by three (or four) numbers - and thatās about it.
What humans can see is a limited part of a body that contains all colours described by these numbers. Here is one (of many possible) representation of it: File:3D Graph of LMS Color Space.png - Wikimedia Commons
āPure greenā does not exist per se, it gets defined by the respective gamut, each of which puts its red, green and blue corners in a place that is selected to an end, like creating a smaller or bigger triangle in order to e.g. be representable on real-life monitors or enclose surface colours as contained in Pointerās gamut etc.
This is not really necessary because the mathematical models can do without. Nevertheless, technical things have their characteristics and tend to relate to known models like the āStandard Observerā due to the work that has already been done in this area.
In the end - and oblivious to any colour science - the question remains whether photography serves to reproduce or as a means to create art.
Art, or intellectual property, begins with how one āmakesā the image. āTakingā the image is reproduction. So, how you set parameters in a scanner, in NLP or after conversion of a negative is a means to go beyond reproduction. What I saw in the album I checked out on Flickr is, imo, definitely beyond repro.
Let me clarify those two:
The point about the colour mapping is that when we are inverting we donāt want that mapping on the ārawā positive scan. We want to invert what ārealā R G and B values are there and then have all the colour space and āwhatās visibleā mapping happen on the inverted image.
If our scan of the neg (as positive) is already interpreted in terms of human vision, we will end up with distortions we donāt want. Thatās what I was clumsily trying to get at. The negative is not something we want an accurate āpictureā of. Itās simply a carrier of R G and B information that we want an accurate āseparationā of into an R G and B value map that we can invert. That inverted map then gives us the filmās āinterpretationā of its ācolour visionā (as designed). And thatās how an analogue colour process would work. It would be projected on to colour paper for prints or another colour negative for a positive (cinema film) print.
My own photography is, of course, artistic. Like you say, thatās the point. I often find I have responses to colours I see like the ones we all have to scents. The instant transporting to a place. And thatās what Iām often after. And yes, often amplifying. But the bugbear of all of this is that I want to start in a very very accurate place. And accurate to what the film is saying (because I like those interpretations that IT is making). Then I am free to be creative. If I canāt start somewhere accurate I often find that āmemory smellā I was after colourwise eludes me. Like with so much art, if you really want to have fun ābendingā reality it is always easiest if you can start with a really accurate and ātrueā base.
Sam
