Bill thanks for your NS 3.1 advices, they are useful, so what do you suggest as a good everyday practise: wide gamut (compensated) or turning color management off?
I use fuji negative film nearly all the time. please see my next post on highlight detail and GEM though - my 2 cents... paul >>>>>>>>clip>>>>> DISCUSSION: (1) By default NikonScan is set up with color management ON and outputs files directly to a profiled colorspace such as Adobe RGB. However all of the available color spaces reduce the shadow detail. (2) The "Scanner RGB" color space, which is supposed to mirror the raw output of the scanner, produces scans that are dark and have wierd color (what you'd expect from "raw" scanner data), but my scanner profiler couldn't create a good profile with it, and I wasn't able to pull useable shadow detail out of it using Levels. (3) The "Wide Gamut (compensated)" color space has more shadow detail than Adobe RGB, but not as much as with color management off. (4) With color management off you still have to make the right choice from the film-type menu: Negative, Positive or Kodachrome. The scans come out with roughly the right colors and it makes a difference whether you choose Positive or Kodachrome so obviously NikonScan is doing some color correction of the raw data and making different corrections for different film types. (5) The resulting scans are low contrast but can easily be adjusted with the Photoshop Levels dialog. Of course you want to scan in 14 bit (rather than 8 bit) mode so that you can make these tonal changes without posterizing the image. After making tonal adjustments you can downsample to 8 bits per pixel if you wish. (6) Comparing two similar scans, one with color management on and output to "Scanner RGB" space, the other with it off; if you adjust the Levels to grossly lighten the shadows (to see just how much detail you've got down there) you'll find that Scanner RGB seems to have more tonal gradations in the deep shadows than the no color management scan, but with a huge amount of very coarse and color-shifted noise. Therefore the extra tonality of the Scanner RGB scans is not useable for making pretty pictures, although it might be useful for scientific or forensic use.
