Hello all, and sorry if this has been asked before. I am new to film photography and received my first Portra 400 film roll from the lab last week. I was quite satisfied with the results although the sharpness was not perfect, so I decided to invest in a scanner, the Plustek 8200i - this way I also have more control over the scanning and editing process. After having read many articles and watched many videos with amazing results I was tempted to buy NLP, but to be on the safe side I first got the Trial version. After I got the scanner I immediately rescanned some of my favorite shots, I followed the instructions given on the NLP website. I put Silverfast to 48bit HDR and saved it as a .dng with 3600dpi, all the other settings and tools were turned off in Silverfast. I opened it in Lightroom, selected the border to white balance the image, cropped the borders, and then converted the color negative (using the Norsitsu profile and the default saturation). To my surprise the way the picture came out was very disappointing, it was very desaturated and lacked contrast, moreover, the brightness was very high, nothing like the results I got from my lab. I pretty much tried all profiles and settings but to no avail, the picture still seemed lifeless and nothing like the pictures you see on Youtube or on Forums. Only with heavy editing do they turn out somewhat acceptable. From my understanding, the purpose of NLP is to fasten the workflow of scanning negatives but with all the heavy editing I had to do it easily took me 20 minutes per picture. I have tried NLP on a variety of pictures and they all looked this way, even with Pre-Saturation set to high. I have included the Google Drive link to my .dng file as well as screenshots of my settings and the way the picture turned out, I have also included another picture that I have converted through NLP and then (heavily so it doesn’t look lifeless) edited and saved as a .jpg to show that all pictures came out this way, even when edited, I have also included the jpg. of the same picture I got back from my lab. I am new to film photography and scanning so if anyone out there can help me I’d be so grateful as I really want to make this work and if this problem is resolved buy the full version of NLP. Thank you!
In this case, I think the issue is just that the border (or perhaps, it is the inside portion of car or train?) is throwing things off a bit and making the conversion too bright. (Brightness and the perception of saturation are closely linked, so this also makes it appear unsaturated).
Two options:
Lower the brightness considerably
Re-convert, but increase the “border buffer” until only the main scene is showing an not the frame.
I’m using a Plustek 8200i as well, both with Silverfast 9 and Vuescan.
I also have the same issue with the brightness needing to be always around -35, have you figured out any better solution in the settings to avoid this?
Work flow is scan according to the SF/VS guide, scan, WB, crop, NLP.
For me, the issue was that I was using the wrong settings in Silverfast (didn’t set the film type to Positive, to be fair my Silverfast had a bug so it wasn’t possible to change it, had to redownload the app…) and thus it didn’t apply the profile in Lightroom. Since applying the right settings NLP works perfectly fine for me and delivers good results, some tweaking in Lightroom is obviously necessary. Hope I could help!
hi! Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately this doesn’t really solve my issue.
I use the exact same process when scanning BW and Color, but only have the issue with color, so I thought it might have been some other setting.
BW always scans perfectly, with very little needed to be adjusted. Color, I must alway slide the Brightness to the lowest possible. Even then I’m not very happy. The color negatives are exposed and developed fine, it’s only an issue for me to scan them.
