Howdy, I love NLP! I was able to get some amazing results from it, better than the studio I used to use that had Noritsu scanners.
I noticed something in the software that has confused me. When I used to use it, it seemed that NLP would come up with custom color and curve settings for each photo if I did it individually. It would usually reflect the film stock and only need minor tweaks. Now though, it seems that it just loads the last ‘save’ option. I cannot seem to get that custom look for each photo. Now when I use NLP with other stocks, it just looks bad and i have to start from scratch. Is that just me? Or has it been using the saved preset all along? Thanks!
It’s difficult to say what has been set, but you can have a look at what is set by
looking at metadata to see conversion settings
opening NLP and see what settings you have on NLP’s second tab.
If you save settings on the second tab, they will be used on subsequent images. But it does not mean that resulting images will look as good as the ones you used to determine your settings. Every film and film stock differs because of all the things that are/were involved like ambient temperature, lighting, development, exposure and so on.
NLP checks each image and proposes a conversion (r, g and b tone curves and others) for best results within the limits of its process. Nevertheless, there are negatives that don’t allow easy colour conversions and require a lot of tweaking instead.
Take a look at what your “saved” default setting is… I would recommend having your default saved settings be something pretty neutral, with one of the wb autocolor settings (rather than a custom wb settings).
My saved default settings right now are:
Tones: Cinematic Rich
WB: AutoColor Neutral
And everything else is zero’d out. This gives me a good neutral starting point for editing.
If you save your default settings based on a lot of custom tweaks to a specific photo, you could run into the issue that you are seeing.