Nkscan - an open source, cross platform driver for Nikon Coolscan scanners

Flatbed and Film Scanners
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Hey friends,

I want to share some of my recent work with you all, a Rust-based implementation of the Nikon coolscan wire protocol, nkscan: GitHub - activexray/nkscan: Cross-platform, performant driver for Nikon (coolscan) film scanners · GitHub

This library and command line program enables batch-scanning from linux, windows, and macos across the whole coolscan family and adapters (pending a bit of testing on the more exotic ones). This library also includes an independent implementation of the Nikon ICE pipeline so you have access to near-identical dust removal as you’d get in Nikon Scan.

I don’t implement any color processing and leave that to NLP, just a fast and cross-platform tool to get the best quality scans out of the scanner ready for inversion in NLP. Let me know on GitHub if you run into any issues. Thanks!

2 Likes
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Also, as this is a compiled MIT-licensed artifact with a separate library interface, this should enable custom scanning GUIs, perhaps embedded in the likes of the upcoming standalone NLP!

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Hey thanks for this! Quick question: how does batch scanning work for let’s say strips of 6 negatives? Any time I’ve tried to scan as positives so I can invert in NLP it has never been able to reliably find the frames start and end positions and I end up with massive shifts start from let’s say frame 3/4 out of 6 unless I preview all of them first and manually tweak the offset.