I photographed an all white art gallery last week and although the negs were correctly exposed my ‘scans’ through NLP came out underexposed. I’m assuming this is because NLP is trying to pull everything back to a mid much like a camera’s exposure meter.
The problem with this is that between NLP bringing exposure down and me pulling it back up on the TIFF (I find I get better quality doing it this way rather than through the NLP interface) the process introduces more noise.
I think it’d be a great idea to have a high/low key setting, so the software doesn’t pull the neg exposure up/down so much.
Yes, by default, NLP is “normalizing” the black point and the white point. If you scene does not contain anything that should be rendered as pure black or pure white, your best option for now is to try one of the following:
Use the “blackClip” and “whiteClip” settings to set the appropriate points. For instance, in your case, you will want to set the blackClip point to a negative value (this is basically saying that the darkest thing in the scene should be rendered as grey instead of black).
Or, if you have a image from the same roll that is rendered correctly, you can use the “sync scene” feature to bring that conversion over to the more difficult to convert scenes. You can learn more about Sync Scene here.