Cropping manually is tedious and NLP clearly has a way of cropping scans automatically because it does so for the analysis phase. It also clearly has a way of communicating that crop with LightRoom because it shows the crop during the preview stage. Is there any way to make this crop permanent/part of the image without reverting it? Why throw away this useful information and make the user repeat the task manually? Am I missing a checkbox somewhere?
Welcome to the forum! Surely the NLP crop is based upon a percentage of the full frame of the ‘scan’ offered to it which is used simply to give NLP a quick way of removing distracting colours or perhaps rebate from its processing algorithm. The aim is to arrive at a pleasing conversion and is very unlikely to be the final crop needed for aesthetic reasons. It is not associated with the composition or the actual frame of the negative being converted.
That said I think Nate would like to incorporate an ‘auto-crop’ feature and may even be working on it but I can’t imagine it’s that easy to do.
Hi Harry, thanks for the reply! Are you sure about that? Try setting the crop factor on a scan with plenty of borders to 0% or 1%. in my case, it still removes the film border and aligns the frame correctly.
this sort of thing is actually pretty easy using image processing libraries. I’ve done some image processing in the past. Training a classifier is easy enough, but in this case, you could probably just use contrast detection. Training a classifier is very easy in cases where you have a ton of clean data which you’d have pretty quickly. Even nicer would be one that detects half-frame scans and handles the splitting and cropping since that’s annoying.
If you were going so far as to train a classifier, you’d….actually you know what, this is such an easy fun thing to do maybe I will do it as a side project and try to make a little money from it. I bet people would pay $8 for that.
Alright, I wrote a script that handles this and can do entire folders after export.
So that handles it for me but this should really be part of NLP. It’s a minor feature to implement and a major time saver. NLP creator if you want this code, message me and I’ll write an exception to the GPL license in exchange for a couple of NLP licenses 
Mostly kidding its barely even my code anyway
Is this discussion relevant to your request?
Last updated by Nate on June 9th of this year.
Yes, it is the same feature request, albeit worded a bit less clearly. Good to hear it in the pipeline although it does seem that it’s been severely delayed.
My scripted solution solves the problem for me for the time being, but I look forward to it being properly integrated. Most other scanning softwares handle cropping automatically, as it’s not technically challenging and it is very useful to the end user. A prime example of something that should be automated.
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Oh, and while we’re here, negative lab pro should certainly figure out the white balance itself by using a similar technique to find a nice clean patch of film strip from the border. Along with cropping im not sure why that should be manually required.
I’m the very opposite of a power user of NLP but I take an interest because I have a large number of colour negatives that I’d like to dip into at some point. I think anecdotedly it seems that you can often get the same results whether you sample the rebate or not so perhaps something similar is already happening, and then of course a lot of film holder systems don’t let you include rebate anyway, at least with the basic 35mm frame.
Right, and I suspected that it would do that automatically except that the instructions say to do it manually before conversion so I have to assume that it doesn’t. It’s a good point about the scanners having different borders. I’m not sure how to account for that except to say that camera scanning is popular and usually extends slightly beyond the edges.
Sorry for my inexperience. I am not clear how to add the utility to Lightroom Classic in Windows 11. Use plug in manager? The program will be a welcome addition to my workflow.
Thanks,
Mitchel
In one of his posts, @nate mentioned that he’d be looking into adding an auto-crop feature to NLP.
Automatic cropping can help simplify a workflow, but occasionally, a crop needs to be adjusted manually, e.g. to get rid of a larger area of clipped highlights.