Hi everyone!
I recently got an Epson v550 and have been using it to scan some old negatives with NLP and compare my results to the scans I got from the camera store that developed them (details on all my software below and photos). I’ve tried playing around with several different things: whiteclip/blackclip, adjusting white balance, different tone profiles and initial settings. None of it works so far, the colors still look pretty terrible. I’m also having this problem with every negative I’ve tried scanning. Some look better than others, but all of them have wayyy higher contrast and much wonkier colors than the lab scans. Any help at all is much appreciated! I’m still on the trial version so I would love to figure out what my issues are before I run out of it. Thanks!!!
- Using NLP 3.0.2 in Lightroom Classic 14.3.1 on Mac OS 15.5.0
- Scanning on an Epson v550 with Epson Scan 2
Link to TIF of my negative:
Initial result using NLP (haven’t changed any settings at all)
Scan I got from the lab:
Welcome to the forum @mbrown3
Here’s what I get:
From left
- your image, aligned and cropped
- converted with NLP 3.0.2 in LrC 13.4 on macOS 14.7.6 (Sonoma)
- same, but white balanced before converting.
According to the help text on NLP’s first tab, TIFF scans should not be WB’ed … and we can see that following directions helps in this case. The heavier cast you’ve got could indicate that you re-converted without un-converting (or resetting) the image before conversion. These features are available on the first tab too.
That definitely looks a lot better! I was definitely white balancing beforehand and it looks like that caused some problems. However, I’m still having some trouble pulling all of those red tones out, even with your fixes. Here is another image, this time without any white balancing before NLP conversion. This image definitely doesn’t look as bad as the last one, but the colors are still pretty off.
NLP:
TIF:
Lab Scan:
Just try different settings on the first tab: Colour Model and Pre-Saturation.
Also, the second tab holds a lot of presets that will give you more natural looks.
Please note that NLP needs some colour to work with. The examples shown here tend to be almost monochromatic with mostly reds and blues. Greens are very dark or almost grey.
As an exercise, you could try a manual conversion, check out the tone curves:
The screen shows a conversion done with DxO PhotoLab, but any app that can flip tone curves will do. Manual conversions can help with difficult negatives, but aren’t as comfortable as NLP.
