Introducing: Negative Lab Pro v2.0

Thanks @jam - ok, yes the blue channel is just a bit too narrow for NLP to be able to set points. (There is plenty of actual levels in there since it is 16 bit, but my controls in the tone curve pane are only 8-bit). I will update the Tiff Scan Utility to better deal with cases like this!

Hi Nathan,

I’ve been trying the plugin since March and I can say this version made my purchase it. I bought the plugin a few minutes ago and I just wanted to say that it’s an incredible tool. I don’t know how you’ll be able to make it better, but whatever I can do to help you, feel free to ask!

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Thanks so much @pablonavarroB :facepunch: That really makes me happy to hear!

Hi! Version 2.0 is a gamechanger for me. Thank you Nate for your work!. If I may, I want your opinion on a few “wishes”. It is great that we now have the possibility to save our settings/preset as default. `But I think it would be even greater if we had the possibility to store different presets :slight_smile: . That way it would be possible to,store different presets for different films, projects,… And another question:Is there a way to make the “copy to” also sticky? Have a great day!

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Thanks for reply. Anyway, I’m using NLP with big pleasure!

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Any chance for custom curves in the future?
I am really impressed by NLP 2.0 however I don’t like the color that I am getting. I am not getting that “film look” . Everything is super digital, crisp …it lacks that film look. It more looks like an image that I’ve shot with my Sony a7III than on film. I still haven’t finished my scanning setup, but so far I am struggling with getting these nice smooth flat tones. I’ll make some more posts with samples later.

Spectacular improvement! I use VueScan as my main scanning software and the new RAW conversion is excellent.

I’m having one peculiar issue in LR. I can select the scanned negative DNg and convert it to see the positive. I can change the color mode from Autocolor, to none, to Kodak, etc and see the image change on screen, but If I modify the Settings slides and check boxes, the changes don’t appear on screen. The only way I have to see the changes to the setting slides is to go back to the Convert tab, unconvert the image, and re-convert it to see the effect of my tweaks… any idea of what might be causing this?

Hmm… can you go to “preferences > performance” and make sure the graphics processor is completely OFF? With a Lightroom update it’s possible that this got turned on again, even if you had it off before. There is a glitch with graphics processors in LR in their interactions with plugins. I’m being told by Adobe it will be fixed in Lightroom Classic v 9.

If you check and this is already off, I’m not sure what is going on exactly and may need to get some more diagnostics from you.

If anyone is experiencing a similar problem, make sure you are using Negative Lab Pro from the Library module. I was launching the plugin while in the develop module and it behaved as described in my first post, but when I launched and operated the plugin from within the Library all changes to all the sliders were visualized in real time.

Hi Nathan,

is it possible to add more resolution options for “positive copy”: 300 and 600 ppi?

Thank you!

In version 2.1, the “positive copy” feature will be integrated with Lightroom’s own export module, so you’ll be able to set whatever resolution options you’d like!

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Hello, is there any plan that this will be available also for other software than Lightroom?

As a MacOS user with Catalina, the old version of Lightroom and Photoshop is not supported anymore and I will not pay monthly subscription.

So I wanted to check if you are looking at new options or you will keep focusing only on Adobe products? thanks

Hi, With 2.0 is it still typically necessary to pre-white balance before running NLP? It seems to my eye to make only a minor difference either way, if any difference.

Comments welcome.

TJ Longacre

Hi TJ!

It depends…

If you are digitizing with a digital camera, it’s possible that your “as-shot” camera white balance will already be pretty close to what you’d get white-balancing off the film border. For instance, if your “as-shot” white balance was 2900k during capture, you probably won’t see much difference if the computed border white balance is 2800k. In most cases though you would see a large difference if, say, your “as-shot” white balance was set to 5000k on your camera, and your computed white balance off the film border is 2000k… there are other factors as well, such as your illumination source, film type, shot density, etc that could also effect this.

If you are using a traditional scanner, the current recommendation is to NOT white-balance off the film border prior to conversion and just leave as-is. The reason for this is that currently, with both TIFF and Vuescan RAW, the underlying profiles are single-illuminant, which impacts the way that white balance works in Lightroom. I’m working on dual-illumant profiles for Vuescan and Silverfast RAW that will work better when white-balanced off the border.

Hope that helps!

-Nate

Creator of Negative Lab Pro

Hi Nate,

Got it, thank you very much!

Tim

can you get dual-illuminant profiles from SilverFast 48-bit tiff files?
or they must be RAW (dng) files?

They have to be RAW (dng) files.

thank you for the verification Nate.

my testing yesterday shows that saving as RAW dng produces great results, and saving as Gamma 2.2 L* Gradation (SilverFast’s word for linear?) 48-bit tiffs (with iSRD) are very very close in quality. the big error that I was making was turning the analog lamps up too high. 100 seems to be the sweet spot. 200 begins turning the images green.

using gamma 2.2 allows me to see if we’re getting most of the histogram.

tested combinations include:
in Positive mode, with lamps at 0, 100 and 400, at gamma values of both 1 and 2.2:
RAW dng
RAW tiff
48-bit tiff
in Negafix mode, at gamma values of both 1 and 2.2 (lamps can’t be changed in Negafix mode):
RAW dng
RAW tiff
48-bit tiff (for comparison of inversion results)

also tested NLP processing the images directly, and processing the images after using the Prep utilities.

NLP is incredible. it’s the only reason I have Lightroom on my Mac :slight_smile:

cheers.