[filmscanners] Nikon Color Management

["Ed Lusby" <elusby@adelphia.net>]

I recently obtained the Nikon LS5000 scanner and began to try to obtain a
profile for Kodachrome scans. The Nikon Scan 4.0 software has 4 profiles,
one specifically for Kodachrome.  Probably to no surprise to anyone on this
list, it doesn't work very well. Reds and greens are dull, scenes with
early morning sun are dull, some slides are very flat, etc.  At this point
I tried Vuescan which gave me much better results. A vuescan IT8 generated
profile was slightly better than the builtin Vuescan profile.  Skin tones
were a bit warm, however with both Vuescan profiles.  However, the scans
were slower in Vuescan (2.4'/slide vs. Nikonscan's 1.7'/slide, using the
slide feeder, dust removal, and color processing). Also, Vuescan is a
little querky; the logfile quit working, and sometimes just doesn't work
without restarting it.

This is an introduction to my question. Nikonscan 4 doesn't allow custom
profiles to be used, much to my dismay. I would like to use Nikonscan
because of the greater speed and perhaps better fine tuning controls. I
thought I could trick Nikonscan by renaming my vuescan profile to the same
name as the profile used by Nikonscan. Of course, Nikon wouldn't tell me
the name/location of their profiles, but it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to
figure it out.  The location is Program Files/Common Files/Nikon/profiles
for WinXP.  The kodachrome profile is, I believe:

NKLS5000_K.icm

The profile generated by Vuescan was a icc extension. As a raw rookie, I'm
not sure of the difference, if any between icm and icc profiles. One
website I found said they were the same except for extension name, and that
all profiles should be icc.  I noticed however, that icm profiles are
usually 200KB or more, while icc profiles are only 1-4KB.  So my question
is, is there an inherent difference in icc and icm profiles? I tried to
rename my vuescan profile to Nikon's profile name and pasting it into the
Nikon profile directory.  Nikonscan functioned, but the resulting output
was grossly overexposed.  Since the output changed, the above profile must
be the Kodachrome profile used by Nikonscan.  However, since the scan
didn't work as it did in Vuescan, does this mean there is something
different about Nikon's profile format compared to the ICC standard? Or is
there some other explanation?  If Nikon has a proprietary ICC format it
would explain why they wouldn't give me any information about their
profiles, and it would explain why Nikonscan doesn't allow custom profiles,
because they would be incompatible.

Ed Lusby


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