I a new to digital photo processing (darkroom B&W mainly) but i would like to invert and process my preferred color negatives (few per year but with exhibition-quality of color adjustments).
In europe lightroom classic subscription costs 144 euros every year and I am not ready to have this regular subscription spending for a few images.
I would not need complicated photoshop type features, and I do not object paying once for a good software, but my question is if NLP could be offered also as standalone with a shell offering basic processing features to avoid this adobe subscription scheme ? For me this subscription scheme is a nogo unfortunately
Negative Lab Pro depends on features that only Lightroom provides.
But let’s consider a few things to get you started anyway.
Question: How many photos will you actually print per year, and at what size? A decent fine art print can easily cost 150 euros and then, the added price for the subscription might not be too terrible. Note that I don’t like subscription models, but Lightroom is central to my work and I can usually update my subscription for less than 100 euros per year.
Info: Earlier versions of NLP would run with Lightroom version 6 and maybe @nate could sell you an older version, which would still require Lightroom 6, which might not run on the OS your computer uses.
DIY: Other than that, you can get decent conversions manually. All it takes is some exercise (=time) and an application that lets you invert the tone curves from / to \ for each of the r, g and b channels plus some tools for hue shifts. Darktable (and possibly other apps) incorporate inversion functions.
Reality Check: Nevertheless, there’s always a relation between quality, time/effort and cash-out.
You usually can’t get better quality for a cheaper price with less effort (=time spent)…