Greetings to the whole forum, I am a passionate amateur photographer of analogue photography, shooting with Olympus 35 mm and rolleiflex 6x6 almost exclusively in black and white, I’m doing some scanning tests with Epson V600 and a Dsrl system with Nikon d500 and sigma macro 150 f2.8, I use Lightroom CC to catalog the scanned files, I would like to buy “Negative Lab Pro” but I don’t know if I will be able to get the advantages of editing with Lightroom tools, I understand that it is mainly used for films with colors, do you advise which may be the best decision? Does anyone have black and white scanning experiences with modification with Negative Lab pro? Are there any tutorials?
Thank you very much.
Max
I bought NLP to process my dslr color film scans and an very happy with it. I use Lightroom CC and want to keep a non-destructive workflow when I can. I started with home scanning of black and white negatives and got used to the weird process of converting them in LR, but it is a real chore compared with converting in NLP. NLP can batch process an entire import much more efficiently than I can do in LR. Ultimately, I take the best shots and finish them using an exported tiff file. Yes “amateur photography”!
I have used Negative Lab Pro to convert b&w negatives in Lightroom, and it works well, but I don’t know if it’s worth the expense of buying it just for b&w. You can get similarly good results (although after a little more initial fuss) by drawing a custom curve in Lightroom to invert the tones to positive, then saving that curve for future use.
Whichever way you convert your negatives to positive, you can use the Lightroom tools to fine-tune them. However, remember that the original file is still a negative, so all the controls work “backwards”: the White slider adjusts the black tones in your positive image, the Shadow slider adjusts the highlights and vice-versa, and so on.
If you’ve ever worked in a conventional “wet” darkroom this will seem natural enough (you’ve already gotten used to the idea that setting your enlarger for more exposure makes the final print darker etc.) but if you don’t have that background it will take a little more time to get used to making Lightroom adjustments.
The easiest way to find out is to download the free trial and compare your process and your results. You get 12 free conversations with the trial.