Recently my conversions have come out with crushed blacks that are clipping even though there is clearly information visible on the negs and i take care not to clip either shadows or highlights when camera scanning (Fuji Xpro3 with easy35). I feel like this hasn’t been an issue before and I wonder if anything changed with the plugin. Bringing up shadows and black levels doesn’t bring back any information in the shadows. Is there any settings that will cause clipping during converison?
I’m attaching two examples (vision3 250d in ECN2) as Raw files and converted tifs as well as an converted example with the exposure brought up to show that the blacks are clipped despite the Raw itself not being clipped.
The only thing I can think of is whether you remembered to set the white point in Lr (by using the WP eyedropper) to neutralize the orange mask before doing the conversion. I imagine you checked your conversion settings in NLP to make sure they are as flat and neutral as possible?
I did set the white balance with the eyedropper tool i am not sure if that changes the black and white points as well. Interestingly if I set border buffer to 0 and include a little bit of the film mask the conversion comes out extremely flat without any clipping of whites/blacks.
Looking briefly on drive I wonder why captured negatives are so dense? You can scan them to much lighter captures and as long as orange mask itself is not clipped you should get a better results
When you neutralize the orange mask with the eyedropper tool, I believe Lightroom does this by adjusting the R,G,B, curves. I don’t think this affects the Black and White points, but it could affect contrast within the tone range. By leaving a bit of blank film in the frame before conversion this does affect the black point of the converted image and could have the effect of decreasing positive image density upward from there. Normally this is not recommended, but if it solves your problem, do it.
The two RAW files don’t produce any clipped blacks on my Mac. I converted with Frontier and very low presaturation settings and a border buffer or crop set to remove the non-image parts.
My Lightroom Classic (14.5.2) tells me that there was no suitable module for NLP. (3.1.1)