I’ve seen similar posts in Feature Request dating back almost 5 years now, but, wanted to create just an open request for just any other program other than Adobe. Many of us would love to support your product, but refuse to support Adobe. Which means we are unable to utilize the product you’ve created.
I think the requests for a standalone are nice, but unrealistic. However, I do wonder if a plugin for any of the other RAW engines out there is more possible now.
CaptureOne has opened up its APK even more recently (see topaz integration). I’m not sure when the last time you looked at this Nate for porting over a plugin
Affinity Photo generally has good support, and, with Photo v.2 I know they did a ton of work on their RAW processing which may allow for better control for the back end support you need.
Both RawTherapee and DarkTable are open source. I’m not sure if there are any barriers to entry here, and, you could probably enable the community developers to help integrate a solution. Darktable already has a base system setup for negative scanning, but it is much more limited than the product you’ve created here.
Really any alternative to Adobe would be appreciated. Look forward to any sort of response or update from you.
Just looked again at the Capture One developers portal and it doesn’t appear anything has changed with their SDK.
As I understand it from the documentation, the CaptureOne plugins are basically limited to:
Export an image out (as a TIFF or JPEG) to a third party program
Reimport that TIFF or JPEG back into Capture One after it has been edited by the 3rd party program
This is enough for something like what Topaz is doing, but so much of what makes Negative Lab Pro so versatile is that is able to directly and non-destructively work with the original RAW file through Lightroom’s SDK, and being able to store the metadata of your NLP settings in Lightroom’s catalog so that you can alway pick up where you left off.
I’ve seen others trying to get around the limitations of the Capture One SDK by using something like AppleScripts to automate some of the interactions in C1, but this method is also very limited in what it can do (and will not work with Windows).
I haven’t looked at Affinity in a while, so that may be worth looking into again.
With both RawTherapee and DarkTable, I believe their model is fully open-sourced, so I’m not sure if the community would be receptive to any kind of paid add-ons? Or if there examples of others doing this successfully?
I’d really love to do a standalone offering at some point, and have done some groundwork on it, but I can already barely keep up with the support and product improvements I already have going on, so it will probably come very slowly unless I make some changes!
Hey Nate, appreciate your response and answering all of my points.
RE: CaptureOne. That is fair, and unfortunate. If they didn’t change anything else then you would be effectively making that standalone product anyways… hopefully they see the power in plugins and enable further access to backend tools.
RE: Darktable and Rawtherapee. I think there would be some backlash from areas of the community, however, it is open source so my understanding is it’s open to use to a degree. It may be worth just pitching an inquiry to the main Dev. team. Their contact page is here: Darktable/ Get in Contact
And, literature for their negative processing attempt is here: negadoctor/
I realize you have your own way of utilizing Adobe’s APK to convert negatives, but, maybe it is possible to get Darktable on board with working with you to develop something, or, use their code to help create that standalone product.
The only Plugin I know for Darktable is the GIMP plugin, however, that is not a paid software so it isn’t a great example really.
To throw some support behind this one. I agree. We need a non-Adobe option. I do suggest a standalone version is the best long term option though. Regardless of what happens with all the image editor options a standalone version would allow someone to use NLP and then edit the output files in which ever editor they choose. It frees up NLP to a much larger demographic.
I am new here and also a non Adobe software person. I switched over to Affinity Photo & Designer for all my needs years ago. Their software is superb. I also wish I could use your product but can’t because of the Adobe requirement.
With the recent drama surrounding Adobe (not even the whole accessing the content manually or automatically thing, because I realize that’s probably happening on my phone) and the self-licensing themselves to your content, I’m at a bit of a crossroads. NLP is fantastic, and I understand being a one-man show, especially on a large scale. I wish I could assist with either a standalone variant or something, but I’m in the same boat with my own professional workload.
That said, Nate, the ability to self-scan and easily convert negatives with nearly flawless results (there are some outliers, but I chalk that up to scanning setup) has reinvigorated my passion for shooting film after 15-ish years of not doing it. Thank you so much for that!
Maybe all this flak Adobe is getting will cause them to make some changes, but I don’t think there’s a real remedy to corporate greed beyond rock-bottom, no bailout bankruptcy.
In light of the Adobe drama, I sent Nick an email a couple of weeks ago asking for alternative application support. I think a standalone app is ideal as it removes dependency on other SDK/APIs, and allows photographers to take their photos into whatever photo edit app(s) they want whether it be LR, PS, C1, Darkroom, Affinity, etc. I hope that Nick is able to find the time to do this, but I know not to hold my breath since it would be a huge undertaking for any small developer.
Personally, I would love to abandon giving Adobe any money, and support smaller developers with the hopes that it will create more competition, drive prices down, increase product feature sets, and in the end benefit the photography community as a whole.
NLP is the best sofware for film scanning that I have ever used. Never had such a beautiful results. I will continue using it no matter what, but we really need some alternative to Lightroom. I know it’s not simple, but being dependent on one product (Lightroom) is not good long term strategy. I’m ready to pay again for standalone app or plugin for another software.
Maybe I’m getting old. But I feel that the way photo editing software are going is not going to be beneficial for film photography.
Honestly all the features that exists right now in nlp 3 together with the basic features of Lightroom is what I need.
But I don’t like adobe. And I don’t think the road map for Lightroom or any other editor will be good for us 10,20 years down the line.
So what I’ve done for safeguarding for the future is that I bought an Intel Mac mini running high sierra and Installed Lightroom 6 with nlp and took it offline. This way I can ensure my film photo editing needs for the future.
That’s when I got the crazy idea. Since making and maintain nlp either as a stand alone app or as a plugin is a lot of work and a constant continuous work. Always having to update it to work with the latest photo editor and operating systems.
Why not port the plug in for a deprecated OS and photo editor. It would be so cool to be able to use aperture 3 for my film photography.
I know it’s probably not possible or a good idea. But I would love to just use an old Mac running Mac OS 9 as my dedicated photo editing machine
