I apologize for the long post:
Just when I thought I was beginning to understand the basics of color management, and now this…
Historically I’ve scanned within PS using File/Import/Nikon Scan 4. I did this rather than opening Nikon scanning software directly because I've been using the color space Ektaspace 5 from Joseph Holmes for my slides. I thought (apparently mistakenly) this technique brought the photo right into the color space without any conversions, i.e. PS was managing color, not NS. Nikon Scan has other color spaces, but none I’ve been interested in using.
Now that I'm using LR, It seemed silly to scan into Ektaspace and then use LR in ProPhotoRGB, so I decided to try the same technique but with ProPhotoRGB as my working color space in PS instead of Ektaspace. I get very poor results with a serious magenta cast and oversaturation; looks almost like when you have color management set in both PS and printer software, but the only change I made was changing the working space from Ektaspace to ProPhotoRGB. All the other settings are the same.
I’ve included two samples, cropped, resized and both converted to sRGB. Although it’s probably obvious, the slide definitely looks like the one labeled Ektaspace, so I doubt that ProPhotoRGB is just showing me “real” colors that are out of gamut in Ektaspace; something else is going on.
Now for the strange part: When I use the ‘preview’ function in Nikon Scan, the preview looks correct! I.e. the preview looks about the same regardless of what color space I’m in. It’s only after the scan has completed and I view the open file that it looks garish.
So two questions: 1) What actually happens regarding color management when I scan using the import function in PS? Is Nikon Scan doing some sort of rendering intent I don’t have control over?
2) Why does ProPhotoRGB give me such different results from Ektaspace? I thought they were relatively close in gamut.
Ugh.
Dave Chew
