NLP and old scanners

Hello All,

Just joined this community because I’m looking at purchasing NLP for my color film scans. I understand that I can scan with Vuescan, outputting a DNG, or Silverfast Ai outputting DNG or TIFF. However, as my scanner is now nearly 20 years old it is not a supported scanner. Does this mean I can’t use NLP? If I can actually run the software and convert a raw file from my scanner, will the colors be all wrong because it’s unsupported?

Thanks for your help.

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Hi
NLP is a plugin for lightroom so if you have a copy of that and your scanner has captured a raw dng or tiff (vuescan works with lots of legacy scanners) then yes you’ll be able to use it. try the trial version first to make sure

Hope that helps

Martin

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Hello Martin,

I’ve used both Sliverfast and Vuescan for nearly 20 years. I’ve played around with converting a couple of Portra 400 negs, but the color isn’t that great. The only option I think I really have for scanning is to scan a linear TIFF via Silverfast because of the age of my scanner. Therefore, there is no profile that allows me to scan into DNG. I think this may be affecting the color I’m seeing. I’ve tried all the available color models and still can’t get anything I’m really satisfied with. A lot probably has to do with my ignorance of using NLP, but, so far, I’m getting much better color using the ColorPerfect plugin that I’ve used for years.

Hi Alan,
scanning your negs as a TIFF in Silverfast definitely works, but DNGs give better color results – at least with my setup.

Nate (the programmer of NLP) has written a very nice step to step guide for using Silverfast and NLP, maybe that helps you with getting better colors.

@Jaroslaw

Yeah, I finally did get it to work. I followed the instructions listed in this forum, but no luck at first. I don’t know what changed…maybe, I held my mouth differently when scanning! :wink:

Anyway, I sent a Vuescan DNG file to Nate and he is going to build a profile for my scanner. I do think and agree with you that having a profile enabling me to scan to DNG will provide better results. We’ll see…

Yeah, it’s kind of tricky. But with a bit of trail and error (and following Nate’s instructions) you should definitely get some decent results.