Blue cast scans on LS-8000

If you have an LS-8000 try this, later I will tell you why its significant. Launch

Nikon Scan and open the preferences window. Turn off Nikon CMS (Color

management). Then open any other preferences category which has to do

with previews or final scanning. De-activate all "Auto Exposure" settings for

Negative films, you can leave "Auto focus" enabled.

Load a carrier with any negative film, from any manufacturer at any ISO. Do

the usual thumbnail preview and then select the frame to "Preview".

Does your image look right? Any severe color casts? Does it look like the

thumbnail?

If you have the problems above. You may have big trouble profiling your

scanner to use print film using many consumer level device profiling software

packages out today. Why? Because any profile generation software, like

MonacoEZcolor, Pantone, Greytag. Is going to ask that you, not only turn off

your scanners Color Mangement Options, but it will want you to disable any

"Auto Exposure" before making a baseline profiled scan and any following

scans when using that work-flow."Auto Exposure" will calibrate the preview

to the final scan negating the profile. Whats the work around? ROC/GEM is

not an option- for reasons to long to go into here. My transparency

work-flow does not suffer from turning off Nikon color management and

Auto Eposure it is only Print negative film. Has anyone else experienced the

blue cast to negative films with "Nikon CMS" and "Auto Exposure" turned

off? And yes, I have spent the last two days on the phone with Nikon

technuckle sports, they will not try to replicate the problem and have

provided no viable solutions.

My scans come out of the scanner pretty cold, but nothing that I would describe as a colour cast. Your best bet is to pick a colour space and then deal with what you get in photoshop.

<i>You may have big trouble profiling your scanner to use print film using many consumer level device profiling software packages out today. Why? Because any profile generation software, like MonacoEZcolor, Pantone, Greytag. Is going to ask that you, not only turn off your scanners Color Mangement Options, but it will want you to disable any "Auto Exposure" before making a baseline profiled scan and any following scans when using that work-flow."Auto Exposure" will calibrate the preview to the final scan negating the profile.</i>

<p>

According to your logic does it not follow that no scanner can be profiled? I am trying to follow you...

<p>

<i>"Auto Exposure" will calibrate the preview to the final scan negating the profile.</i><br>Can anyone who has created a profile confirm this?

Troy

Profiles can only be created for slides, not for negatives. My EZ Color profile works well even though it is created with Auto Exposure on. I use Nikon scan with the Nikon CMS off, if you are getting the blue cast, you could try scanning the negatives as slides, inverting the image in Photoshop, setting the end points in levels and then adjusting your color and contrast with curves.

 

Raymond

I will try to explain. Even though two monitors from the same manufacturer

built on the same day roll off the same assembly line, that does not mean that

they hold the ability to display the same range of color gammet to which they

were designed. They will be close but will most likely not match each other.

This is true for color devices like monitors printers and scanners. Even so,

manufactures supply what's known as "canned profiles" to describe there

devices. These profiles are calibrated to design standard, not a "known

standard". A known standard being the specific tolerance each individual

device has to display its engineered gammet. What this means is that even

though you have a profile for your scanner or monitor supplied by the

manufacturer it may not accurately describe your device. So, in order to

re-align the monitors tolerance to display color to every other device in your

desktop work flow you must calibrate each item, or build a device specific

profile. Color management software makers such as Monaco systems offers a

consumer "entry level" device profile generating software package that builds

profiles for your monitor, scanner, and printer. In order to build a profile for

the scanner Monaco asks that all CMS be turned off and all Auto Exposure be

disabled during the process of building the profile which later will be used

each time you scan an image and open it in an application which uses CMS

work flows. i.e. PhotoShop. The catch here is that unless you scan every

image after that using the exact same settings as you used to produce the

profile for that scanner your scans will be out of the profiles work flow, and

therefore negate the process. Auto Exposure changes the settings for the

scanner EACH time it scans a new image, which negates the first profile scan

done to establish the work flow.

First of all, if monitor variations are what you are trying to eliminate, you don't need to profile your scanner at all. Profile your monitor, setup PhotoShop correctly, and you're done. Now whatever you see on your monitor should match (within color gamut limitations) anything you print on a properly profiled printer. If the scan is a little (or a lot) different from what you were expecting, just adjust it in PhotoShop. I add red and take out blue from just about every scan I make.

 

If you are really bent on your prints matching color from slides as closely as possible, it makes sense to profile your scanner as well. I would guess that your profiling software came with a calibration slide. The downside to this is that auto exposure is really helpful to the scanning process in that it allows the scanner to optimize for the density range of the particular slide you are scanning.

 

Given the variations in negative film, I don't see how it would be possible to profile a scanner for negatives without shooting a color target on each kind of print film you plan on using. With a slide, it is very clear what a color should look like, but with negative film, labs have to correct for each individual type of film. There's no real standard that I know of.

 

One last thing I don't understand from your question. Are you just complaining that when you turn everything off your scans have a blue cast? Correcting a color cast is what profiling is all about. If you have generated a proper profile, every scan should get corrected when that profile is applied. For your software, I'm not sure where it would get applied, but one way would be to scan with the raw settings and then apply the proper profile in PhotoShop. Again, I don't see how this could work with negative film, but maybe I'm wrong on that point.

Noshir,

 

Matching a transparency to the monitor is a major part of what I am trying to

do. I spend alot of time and effort getting the best exposure, color on film. I

dont want to have to duplicate my efforts in Photoshop trying to match what

should have scanned correctly in the first place.

 

AS far as the original question (blue cast with negative film) I think that I

either have a defective scanner or this is just normal scanning effect for the

LS-8000 after Auto Exposure and CMS is turned off. If its normal, fine I will

set about finding a workaround. If its not behaving like everyone elses

scanners then I need to send it in.

Here is a link with sample scans.

http://www.photo.net/photodb/presentation.tcl?presentation_id=174592

This may be normal - my Nikon 4000ED comes out cool as well with VueScan color set to neutral or none (and a spyder-calibrated monitor).