Nikon Coolscan Color Problems

[frankienardoz]

HI GUYS,

I have a big problem with my Nikon Coolscan V ED. I got development and scans in a cheap place and the colors in the scans looked great. I am now trying to scan the images in hi res with my Nikon Coolscan and I notice that the colors are very different and ugly. They look less saturated and with a blue prevalence. I played around with the color balance, curves etc on the coolscan tolls palette but I had very poor results. It almost looks like I was scanning on a wrong film type setting.

Does anyone know a plug in or color calibration or a way to get the color right. Please let me know. I am going crazy!


Thanks in advance.

Frankie

 

[dexdog]

I don't know of any color calibration fixes, but can attest that I had the same problem. Frustrated by the ability to fix it myself, I bought a copy of Vuescan. Vuescan gives much better color rendition at the defualt settings than I was ever to get from the NikonScan software, even after extensive efforts.

 

[not_in_good_order]

I recommend using a dedicated photo editing application such as Lightroom to adjust your scans. A slight color tint or other issue is much easier to correct in a tool like Lightroom than rescanning a bunch of times trying to get the result you want straight out of the scanner. Not to mention applying sharpening, resizing, adjusting contrast, and countless other post processing tasks. I don't think it is realistic to expect fully finished images to come directly out of the scanner. I just see scanning as one step in my image creation process. I only rely on my Coolscan to give me a nice, detailed TIFF so I can use a dedicated tool to carry out the next steps in crafting an image that is pleasing to me.

 

[wgerrard]

I use a Coolscan V ED and make no attempt to edit images in either Vuescan or the Nikon software. Dedicated photo editing software like Lightroom or Photoshop does a much better job.

Use the scanner and the scanning software to collect as much data as possible from the negative and then use your editing software. The results will be gratifying. The images my scanner produces are flat and washed out, but they quickly come back to life in Photoshop. I can't duplicate those results with Vuescan or the Nikon software.

In addition to Photoshop, Adobe also markets Photoshop Elements at a much lower price, usually well below $100. It lacks the prepress/print capabilities of its big brother, but is a very good tool for manipulating photos.

If you do acquire Vuescan, here is a link that might be useful.

 

[zerobuttons]

Are you sure you are using the same colour space in your picture editor, that you scanned to with the scanning program?

 

[silent1]

Funny enough, I get much better colours from my Coolscan 4000ED using Nikoscan than by using Vuescan. White balance with Vuescan has always been a mess for me, even with the lock exposure, lock color, lock everything calibration procedure. By using Nikonscan I get wonderful scans, way more realistic than lab scans.
Too bad Nikoscan is such a buggy software on Snow Leopard 🙁

 

[Mackinaw]

Remember that NikonScan has a generic one-size-fits-all color profile which may or may not give you the best colors. I finally gave up trying to get a good looking scan and went the Silverfast route (preferring their software to Vuescan, though both do the same thing).

Also, no problems at all using NikonScan with my MacMini and OS 10.6.

Jim B.

 

[wgerrard]

FWIW, I became unhappy with the results scanning color negs to RAW in Vuescan with my Cooolscan and now scan to TIFF with a DNG extension (it's an option). I do minimal tweaking in Camera Raw, and typically a few Auto adjustments in PS. Only a very few files require more extensive post-processing. I don't attempt to do any editing in Vuescan.

This likely has more to do with my lack of skills than anything else, but it works for me.

 

[Tim Gray]

I think the best commercially available solution for good colors on a Coolscan is Colorperfect. It's got a crummy interface, but it gives good results. I rank Nikonscan as the next best and Vuescan (for color) last. Never had much success with Silverfast either.

In my opinion, there are certain adjustments that should be made in the inversion stage, which either has to happen in the scanning software, or elsewhere from the raw scan data.

Also, while per-film 'profiles' are nice, I'd be shocked if they were much more than just individual RGB gamma corrections based on the published data for each film.

 

[Ranchu]

Try this. Open the scan into photoshop, go to Edit>Assign Profile, and assign the 'LS8000 v3.1.0.3000' profile. It should be there. If not you'll have to track it down and put it where photoshop can find it. Then go Edit>Convert To Profile, and convert to srgb or whatever.