I was hoping someone could help me figure out if I am doing something wrong in my conversion of this attached scan.
When I first hit convert in NLP, the converted image (without edits made to it), comes in super dark, and only by raising brightness and expose to 30 each will the conversion become useful (I then have to edit the color cast).
I don’t think the negative itself is underexposed, because the final image comes in fine. Before conversion I also make sure to crop the photo tightly, or even just on the subject (the baby) rather than the full image in case the bright background is throwing off the conversion, and it still happens. White balance I also correct using the white balance tool before conversion.
Here is a link to the raw unconverted file, and I am attaching the way it looks after initial conversion without edits (at Type: Negative; Source: Digital Camera; Color Model: None; Pre-saturation: 3 - default), and the edit I was able to come up with after pushing the exposure and brightness sliders all the way to 30.
Is there something I am doing wrong in the initial conversion? It seems strange that it comes in so dark.
I am on NLP v3.1; using digital scanning with a Sony A7RV and the Sigma 105mm macro lens using the Valoi easy120 system with the built in light source.
Thank you; I just tried following your steps exactly and I think that did the trick; looks like the main difference was that I hadn’t cropped in enough (I was relying the border buffer instead leaving a small area), and I had set color model to “none” instead of “basic”.
Going through the steps, I now set white balance using the unexposed border (came in at 2,900 temp, -20 tint), and cropped in all the way as you can see. I then converted as negative, digital camera, basic color model and 1 pre-saturation:
I recommend to test different settings on both the first and second tab, playing or testing nlp systematically to find a setting that gets close to what you want on as many negatives as possible. The color model “none” is the one I almost never use and different border buffer settings can change the converted image’s look considerably.
