Low number manual assembly made in non-Asia niche product. Similar to Filmomat which is even €€€.
Sure, that would explain it - but doesn’t make it any less expensive, needless to say 
.
1 Like
OK, interesting thread. I can’t imagine Nate being too thrilled about us discussing competition to his product on his product’s web Forum, but maybe NLP comes out on top anyhow considering price and capability after all is said and done. One of the alternatives has obscurantist instructions, another requires Tahoe, another is costly for what it does, another seems to be comprehensive but very costly, and on it goes…NLP looks more and more like the “sweet spot”; but as time permits no harm doing some exploring regardless.
1 Like
I think the standalone will be even sweeter, since it will integrate RGB support and should bring the color conversion more in line with these newer products. I’m not sure to what extent being built on Adobe’s color engine limits the plugin version, so I am eager to try the standalone. For now, NegPy has become my gold standard for straight color conversion, but I cannot say I enjoy using it.
We’ll see. And I’ll test Nate’s standalone app, not because I want to get out of Adobe Lightroom Classic (it’s still a good deal and I don’t mind the subscription any more) but I expect Nate’s app to provide the options that others don’t have.
Being able to fine-tune a conversion can be a big pro, unless there are so many options that interact in ways that are hard to learn. Having too few options can be a pain, but considering that converters can’t probe our aesthetic intentions just yet, we’ll see where things go.
One thing (amongst others) that might tempt me is to not have to switch to and fro between tabs in order to e.g. change what is now on NLP’s first tab.
Hi Digitizer - there are two aspects of NLP I don’t see anywhere else, and they are important to me:
(1) The ability to generally produce a good quality conversion while remaining in raw format. The saving in storage becomes an important consideration with large volumes of work because my raw files are 123MB and rendered versions a minimum of 275MB. While the answer I hear: “storage is cheap”, it’s not THAT cheap any longer and political events are making the hardware increasingly expensive. To make it tangible: I just invested in 48TB of local storage, it cost me over CAD 3000, and those prices are increasing as we speak. For people with large amounts of accumulated or current material to convert this becomes a substantial consideration.
(2) The integration with Lightroom. I see the point to a stand-alone application, but as I demonstrated in considerable detail during my workshop at PhotoSCHWEIZ 2026 (Zurich), two things are true: (i) a number of Lightroom’s global controls do not work as one would expect on NLP converted photos, but (ii) the local editing tools (using masking) in Lightroom that are not available in negative conversion apps give us a powerful panoply of local editing capability that is often important to extracting the best possible quality from a negative conversion. Combinations of Lightroom’s tools and NLP’s tools make for a powerful set of editing features nothing else duplicates, the key being gaining the experience to know which tool works best for which purpose. Added to which one can flip back and forth between these applications quite seamlessly during the editing process.
Now, these two features are inter-related insofar as all this editing capability can be exercised on raw files adding de-minimus storage, whereas with most other options one needs to convert to a rendered format in order to subsequently use those specialized tools, and even then, perhaps not as flexibly.
Almost fully agree with your arguments, except for the Lightroom aspect or necessity.
Folks like to get out of subscriptions and then, a standalone app can help, or a plugin to some other app that gets taken over later down the road.
Moreover, Adobe might retire Lightroom classic, but until then, I’ll be happily trodding along with what I have, and at a reasonable price too.
I think it’s important to disentangle the commercial discussion from the technical discussion.
On the technical aspects of Lightroom Classic, I’m not aware of any other application that has the extent of local editing capability on raw files. Perhaps Capture One, but I’m not sure. Maybe my photos are uniquely difficult, I don’t know, but I make frequent recourse to those tools because I find they facilitate specific localized quality improvement in ways that are otherwise difficult. Now one can do a lot of that with the combination of Camera Raw and Photoshop - but you’re still in the same Adobe family with that and the same commercial considerations apply.
On the commercial side, I get it, there are many people who have an inveterate distaste for subscription models. Of course the analogy is to housing where you either rent or own your house and died-in-the-wool owners would never succumb to renting. But it’s different because a house is usually an appreciating asset while deprecated software is a wasting asset. When Adobe introduced the subscription model there was a huge debate about how users were being “ripped off”. Then they introduced the pricing scheme at $10 per month for the photographer package (Ps + Lr), which put the most powerful editing suite on the planet into peoples’ hands for the price of two coffees at Starbucks (OK, the fancier ones). Before the subscription model we owned our licenses to the “perpetual” versions. They were “perpetual” for 18 months. Then Adobe upgraded the version always with a few tantalizing new features you couldn’t live without once you knew they existed, and the price to upgrade both apps came to about $250. If you do the math, you’ll notice that the cost per month of the subscription model was a few bucks less - for renting instead of owning. But when you get down to really thinking about it, “ownership” was temporary because after 18 months, if you were staying up-to-date, that ownership expired, so how much difference is there between transient ownership and renting… 
This realization is when I lost interest in that debate. So much software these days is subscription based, it’s the new normal whether we like it or not; I would not make a software decision on this basis; but that’s me, I know others would.
I never minded Adobe’s LR+PS subscription because it is cheap, and my pricing appears to be locked in at the old rate. That’s why I won’t cancel it even if I’m not really using it. I would be much more excited to cancel my Capture One if another software can replace it. Way more expensive for me, but really very nice software overall.
Kind of off-topic, but what is there about C1 you find better than LR? I’ve had several versions of C1 in the past and just didn’t see the point of maintaining it.
I only moved to it after they introduced the negative conversion feature. It does a very basic inversion and auto levels which I found gave me better conversions after I had moved to an RGB light source. I have since upgraded my camera, which made the difference in conversions between software much smaller, but still the layout, ease of color corrections, and general workflow feel far more comfortable for me than LR. I’m actually a big fan of C1 except for the price.
Interesting, and yes, I’ve heard about their negative inversion feature and that it’s pretty basic. As for the workflow and rest of it, having used C1 in the past, I agree it’s decent software, but I think much depends on what one gets used to. And their pricing is a deterrent, no doubt. A long while back, pre-LR days, I sat on a panel in New York featuring a contest between four prominent converters and the outcome indicated that one way or another you could make all of them do about the same thing in terms of end results. I don’t think that story would change much if we repeated the same thing today.
Definitely one can make the results match with enough work. But at the time, I found I could get to a result I liked very quickly with C1, whereas NLP was not liking the RGB source. After upgrading my camera from the A7Rii to A7Riv, the difference became much smaller. And now with the new/alternative converters we’ve been discussing, the automated results match or beat the best I can easily do in C1, but with less effort.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Nate was prompted to embark on his standalone project after Adobe doubled the subscription for the ‘Photography Plan’ to new subscribers in January 2025. So in the UK this was from £9.99 to £19.99 per month at a stroke. Existing users were unaffected and remain so I think.
I suspect that many of the new enthusiasts coming into film photography are quite young, college students maybe, so that price increase would have been very unwelcome to them and so a big barrier to using NLP, quite apart from any philosophical dislike they might have for subscription models in general. It seems to me that creating a version of NLP separate from the Adobe subscription pricing would be a sound business decision (so long as it doesn’t take too long getting there).
Whatever new converter comes along, there is a chance that it makes our workflow easier and that alone, imo, justifies testing the newcomers.
Let’s not forget that Filmomat and Lento provide self-advancing film holders, something I’d get, if not for their current price…and the cut strips for archival sleeves. Still, 120 film is harder to keep flat, specially if it was kept rolled and uncut. So, apart from any discussion about software, there are a few questions that need to be explored: dust, warps, faded dyes etc.
BTW, if you check promotional videos, you’ll see that they all use perfectly flat material, also for iMax 
https://youtu.be/SYkAWTmpTBc
I agree - could well be. I’m hoping the stand-alone will still allow us the flexibility to revert back and forth between Lr and NLP in raw mode. We’ll see when it comes.
And yes, the Adobe price increase is unwelcome for new users, but it has to be said, they held the original pricing for twelve years and still maintain for legacy users, which is highly unusual.
I’m using just a conventional white light source - Kaiser Slim Plano, and depending on the settings and the negatives, the results out of the box from NLP are pretty good. I’ve yet to prepare a photograph that comes out right upon conversion. They all need at least minimal work. After I upgrade my OS I’ll be testing one or more of these alternatives out of curiosity and see whether I can replicate your experience!
People don’t often mention the powerful database features in Lightroom Classic, in fact I don’t think that Adobe mention them either which is a shame. Very hard to appreciate unless you’ve used those features but for me it would be very difficult to do without. I think that Capture One have a rudimentary database in their Catalogs which they could have developed more since they bought a database company but chose not to. Camera Bits added a database to Photo Mechanic for the ‘Plus’ version but have just now abandoned it. Lightroom Classic is on its own as a complete processing package with a database but its not clear at all on the Adobe website where of course it has to compete with, er, Lightroom (not the Classic one).
Hard to imagine that the standalone will have any database features so I too hope that it will integrate with Lightroom to an extent seeing as it promises to have new features that were impossible to provide within Lightroom.
Hope so too…and using a standalone app as a plugin seems to be fairly easy to do. DxO does it with its products like e.g. PureRAW. All it takes is a plugin for export and import - and some brainwork on how and what to interface, be it folders or collections.
Nevertheless, returning “just a cookbook” might not be possible or sensible, as a standalone app is supposed to cooperate with other apps. TIFF or DNG? We’ll see.
Nate mentioned in the other thread that there will be a catalog holding non-destructive edits, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be a full-fledged browser with collection and ratings, etc.