Just wanted to say thank you for making this program. I gave up on film because converting colour film was so difficult and time consuming but this gives perfect results and it's easy to use.
Wow! I have been shooting digital my entire life, just recently had the guts to move out to film, and ever since been shooting digital, always try to mimicking how film look like I learnt to do the whole process at home except printing in darkroom... at first was so disappointed how the scanner outputs the photos... and since im partially color blind, adjusting a white balance is a hassle for me I even tried out many software and swoop my scanner which i thought was to blame... till i found Negative Lab Pro group in FB...i was so curious and started my research bout this...gave it a trial for 12 converted photos...less than an hour, i just paid for full version Thank you so much Nate! This is a must for home processing film IMHO... and would appreciate every slide of film even more
One thing that I found being rather frustrating was the problem when using a GPU. To be honest I didn't realize the solution would be so simple, so thank you for pointing that out. Might I suggest that you maybe put that information at the very top of the guide on your website or somewhere really prominent. It is very essential for smooth operation. It would have saved me some frustration.
I’m curious why the negative to positive colour conversion is based on replicating the look of a particular pro film scanner and not based on the film type as in Silverfast. Your approach seems very different and you seem to get great results. You’ve just approached the problem from a totally different perspective. I work 99% black and white (as I’m restoring historical images, glass plates, large format, panorama etc) and not needing to know the original film type is a big plus for me. The saving to tiff is a brilliant feature btw. I’m currently exporting to tiff and reimporting to get over the Lightroom backwards adjustment slider issue with negatives.
Great software, Nate. I've made the mistake of not cropping out the frame properly and converting and couldn't understand why my negatives come out all blue. Solid explanation, thank you! Is there a way to use Negative Lab Pro to convert images and have film borders around the image still?
Answering my own question from one year ago - of course, there is a way! Just crop images before conversion properly, do all the Negative Lab things, and change cropping back again.
Thanks, Nate. Excellent video. I appreciate the simple logics of your tool. Shooting mostly B&W, I was wondering whether Negative lab Pro could bring as much benefits for B&W scans from film. Would you accept to make a video tutorial dedicated to using NLP for b&w photography? Thanks by advance! Photographic cheers from France, Jean
Thanks! Yes and yes - there are some major benefits to both speed and results using Negative Lab Pro for black and white film scans. I will make a separate video that will show more!
@@NatePhotographic Like Jean, I'm considering trying out Negative Lab Pro Nate, but I'm wondering if you ever got round to making a video showing the benefits for Black and White neg scan's ?
I reckon it would work for TIFF generated by a Hasselblad X5 too, right? Don't really like the way FlexColor handles the inversion. it would be nice to have it Photoshop as well!
Hey Nate! I downloaded, installed and I'm very pleased with the results. Have you done any 4x5 DSLR scanning? Currently that is what I am trying to do and just seeing if anyone was a solid workflow for the DIY method and not scanning.
Hi! So glad you are pleased! I haven't personally done any 4x5 scanning but I'm sure there are some in the community who have! Check out the "Negative Lab Pro Users" private facebook group, and I'm sure someone else has some tips!
thanks for this video! I do have one problem with negative lab pro: when clicking the white balance, it is always on 2000 K, all the way to the left. And the images did not really look great after converting. I do use Kodak Portra. Any idea? Thanks
when you white balance you said you would not go past 2400, why is that? If I can't WB off the film mask why can't I opt for daylight setting instead of auto ? the negative is a "sunny 16" type of image.
Hey Nate, in some of your earlier videos, you talk about changing the profile in LR from Adobe Color to Negative Lab. On the trial version I didn't see this feature available, and you don't mention it here. I noticed this video contains edits in both profiles. Is this something we need to do? Thanks for creating this.
Chris - when you first pull up Negative Lab Pro, it now automatically sets up the Negative Lab profile for you (on RAW DLSR scans -- regular scans will not have a camera profile associated with them since you cannot have dcp profiles for non-camera files). The latest version has been upgrade to have Negative Lab Pro set the preset settings for you dynamics - no need to hit a preset. This saves time and allows it to adjust internal calibrations that get it closer to the emulations than was possible with the presets. When you pull up Negative Lab Pro on an image, you should see the Adobe Standard or Adobe Color profile change to Negative Lab automatically (there was a bug in versions before v1.1.4 where it would sometimes not update the displayed profile, even though the profile was correctly being changed in the background, which is what you see happening in this video)
I scan with silverfast and im just starting to learn more about negative lab pro. Then thing i am most confused with, is what (if any) is the benefit in converting the negative to a positive yourself? by that i mean, with silverfast the negative is scanned and converted automatically, so would there be a noticable difference with doing it yourself with negative lab?
The main reason is for people that are "scanning" their negatives with a DSLR camera, where you photograph the negative and you have a RAW file that has to be converted into a positive, and Silverfast doesn't work with regular images from this method, just scanners. Negative Lab Pro helps to propertly invert the negatives just like Silverfast does, so if you're using a scanner then I don't see much of a reason to use Negative Lab Pro instead of Silverfast.
Could you tell me please, can I do dslr scan method, if I have fujifilm x-t30 and 18-55 not macro lens? And just what focal length better need to do this?
Hey nate i have question, basicly i dont have scaner, so my lab scan it for me, and i can ask for 'positive scan' so i get the negative film and convert it with nlp, the problem is most of the lab cant give a little film border that we need to white balance it bcs it fully automatic right, so how u choose the white balance spot? second is it ok to convert it from jpg file?, bcs as far as i know scaner like frontier and noritsu cant give a tiff scan file.
If you want to use Negative Lab Pro with scans from film scanners, you need to set the scan mode to "positive" so that it does not try to invert the image for you. Then use Negative Lab Pro to invert and edit the image. I'm also working on a separate video for working with various film scanners, along with some changes to how NLP works with these files.
You would have to untick the box in Epson Scan 2 that automatically detects your frames, so you can select them manually and have the borders of your film.
I am running into a problem where I white balance off the white masking. It turns the photo a little orange and when I run the plug-in it only dulls the orange and lowers highlights. What do I do?
@@NatePhotographic Unless there is a second button hiding somewhere I did. I checked my masking to make sure nothing was causing an issue and made sure to white balance the photos. I also re-scanned the photos.
@@ChrisBraw There are two buttons. There is an "Apply" button AND a "Convert Negative" button. Based on your description, I'm guessing you hit the "apply" button.
If using Lightroom 6, make sure you have updated to the most recent release of LR 6 (some early version had bug with SDK). Also, make sure to turn off "Use Graphics Processor" in LR preferences (there is still a bug in with this that impacts SDK). One of these two things should fix it!
I want to try this but dont currently own a macro lens for fuji. Anyone tried using with a wide angle lens like the 16mm 1.4 that i can get pretty close with?
There's a free trial, so you can try it! That said, I'm not sure sure you will be able to fill your frame with a 16mm lens (especially if shooting 35mm film - you may be able to get almost there with 120 film or larger)
Hi - on a Mac, just hit "control + N" to bring up Negative Lab Pro. On Windows, you can either go to "file > plugin extras > Negative Lab Pro" or follow the instructions here (www.negativelabpro.com/guide/installing/#windows-hotkey-installation) to install and use the Windows hotkey shortcut. Hope that helps! -Nate
