Setup is a Nikon D5300 with a micro nikkor 40mm F2.8 and iPhone 8
The film is placed about 1-1.5" above the iPhone display on full brightness, exposure 1/8 of a second ISO100 F8.
The lab scan (picture on right) is taken on a Noritsu LS-600, and is much sharper/far better detail
Blown up crop
Is this because of my light source, lens, or that I am out of focus? I tried focusing manually with liveview but wasn’t able to improve it.
If you can get a lab sharp scan, you should be able to get a sharp camera scan too - if both scans have similar pixel dimensions.
If both scans have roughly the same number of pixels, the difference is in how the scans are sharpened by the lab or by you in NLP and/or Lightroom. NLP’s primary function is to convert negatives and does a great job at it too, for sharpening, I’d use Lightroom’s own tools or any of the specialized tools out there.
You could try different settings in NLP and see how they provide different bases for further sharpening.
As for overall color, I find that pre-saturation levels of >3 tend to give me results that are way too green for my taste. Test series (see below) done with NLP 2.1.2:
Due to the results above, I most often convert with pre-saturation set to 2 or 3
