Colorcast & Flat Color issue

[Wilson.L]

Hi All, I have recently purchased the skier box and trying to do some scanning with my Canon R5 & EF100mm but the result I am getting is a little bit far from what I have been seeing here / on the internet, so I am wondering if there is anything in the workflow I have done wrong.

My current work flow

1. Shoot in RAW with Skier box
2. adjust WB base on film border, then crop the image out from border
3. Apply NLP, with digital scan & default saturation & noritsu setting
4. Apply Tone = Lab - Standard, WB = Kodak/Fuji, LUT - Frontier

Example 1 (Portra 400):Skin tone is a little flat and there is some issue in picking up green color (grass shown in blue)

Example 2 (Portra 400): Skin tone is a little flat & overall red tint

Example 3(Pro400H): Significant red tint

Want to see if I can get any advice here. Thanks in advance!!

[Wilson.L]

Example 2

[Wilson.L]

Example 3

[Wilson.L]

Also attaching the RAW here for reference, if it helps to diagnose

Example 1.CR3 and 5 more files

[Digitizer]

Starting with conversion settings “Basic” and pre-saturation set at 3 (I mostly use 2), I get the following conversions:

Color set to Auto-Warm, shadows shifted towards yellow

Tighter crop, Auto-Warm

Color set to Kodak, added some contrast. For further corrections, you might want to play with the color sliders in the mids/highs/shadows tabs (see first image for example)

Note that I cropped off the top part of the portrait to exclude possibly burnt highlights. You can always re-crop after the conversion - one of the beauties of NLP’s staying in raw!

Also note that these conversions are intended to give you a few hints on how to “cook” rather than providing the complete meal.

[Wilson.L]

Thanks a lot for looking at it. I am just thinking the tint is a bit too much and thought it’s my process issue but looks like you are also getting similar result. I am starting to think it’s issue around the film roll itself…

[Digitizer]

Try to think of NLP as the bus that brings you close to home. You still have to walk the last meters though.

The Edit tab has a lot of parameters that can be changed and it takes some time to get the feeling for what settings are needed depending on what your negatives are. I have negatives that are spot-on right after the conversion, others take a lot of effort. Whether a conversion is done easily or not so depends on a lot of things that are out of control of NLP. Still, NLP offers a lot of possibilities to make things work out.

Notes: I mostly keep the settings shown in the upper three bubbles. The lower bubbles are the ones that I then use for refinement. Tints can be removed globally (Temp and Tint sliders) or depending on whether they are in the midtones, highlights or shadows.

[nate]

Hi @Wilson.L , thanks for sharing this great photos!

I’ve had a quick go at these three photos. (Just note that this is on a preview build of the next version and using a new camera profile, so won’t be 1:1 settings, but the same basic principles should apply).

Example 1:

If your goal is neutrality, you should set your camera model to “basic” and on DSLR scans, I typically use Pre-Sat 5 to get the best color separation.

(Remember that if you are using Noritsu color model, it is trying replicate some of the tints and colors of a Noritsu, which will inherently make it less “accurate”)

In the above, I’ve just adjusted the Temp/Tint in Negative Lab Pro to render a neutral balance, and adjusted the tones to my liking.

If you want the skin tone to feel less “flat”, you can do this by decreasing the brightness and pushing up the “lights” slider.

Looking closer at the skin, I also made a slight adjustment to the “highs” color sliders.

Here is the “before” with a bit of blueish tint in the skin tone.

And here is the after. The “highs” color adjustment is great for fine-tuning skin tones naturally.

Image 2

After finishing image 1, I just used the “sync scene” function to bring over the prior conversion, and then adjusted the blackClip and whiteClip points to better capture the tonal range of the image.

Image 3

This one was a bit trickier to balance - but I think this has gotten pretty close to neutral balance.

Hope that helps!

[Wilson.L]

Thanks Nate and also Digitizer for your reply!

Maybe it’s my taste but I think for Example 1-2 the tint is a bit too strong in those edit. I am starting to think maybe it could be due to the film exposure itself (I usually over exposure for 2-3 stops)

For Example 3, I think it is indeed turning much better but again, I am also questioning around the film as well that make it hard for NLP to render.

Guess there are still a lot for me to learn around NLP. Will study further around all those functions!

[Digitizer]

@Wilson.L

Guess there are still a lot for me to learn around NLP. Will study further around all those functions!

Things just don’t simply happen in the way we dream of. There’s always some effort involved. Keep at it and thumbs up!

[Digitizer]

In order to see what the different settings of NLP do, I created a series of screenshots and reimported them into Lightroom. Alternatively, I could have used virtual copies, but they would not directly show what the setting was.

Doing something like this can help get an overview quickly.

[Digitizer]

@nate

I typically use Pre-Sat 5 to get the best color separation.

@nate, have you done this in earlier versions of NLP too? Or only since v. 2.2? Or do you mean that hight pre-sat gives better separation after additional tweaking in NLP/Lr?

In my early tests, I found that pre-saturations above 3 gave me less colour separation.