NONE "color model" should be the default

Digital Camera Scanning
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I have been inverting my color negatives manually with fantastic results for a long time. The only problem I’ve had was extremely low efficiency, that’s why I decided to upgrade to NLP, to speed things up.

To my surprise, the results I was getting with Noritsu and Frontier simulations were much inferior to my own manual inversions. After a few months of frustrations I have finally tried NONE color model and ta-da! I finally got the familiar true film colors.

I figured it’s something NLP community would want to know: unless you want your colors butchered, NONE is what you should be using. I think the naming is quite unfortunate here, it should have been called “Default” or something… It is truly puzzling why Nortisu/Frontier were even added?

However, I think it should be noted that I am digitizing with a Canon 5D Mk4 DSLR. Canon cameras have a “Faithful” preset which Lightroom recognizes. This basically gives you the most realistic colors (i.e. somewhat muted, without artificial cheerfulness so many cameras like to add) and I reckon not every DSLR offers this luxury, so perhaps my advice isn’t applicable outside of the Canon ecosystem.

Anyway… Figured I’d share.

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@DrBormental, your statement sounds interesting. Would you mind sharing HOW you do it, e.g. with a descriptions of the steps you take and a few screenshots?

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Sure, I shared my routine here, with some samples.

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I just want to say that I’ve had several interactions with and follow DrBormental on Flickr and he is a top notch photographer and quite accomplished with developing, scanning, etc. His advice is always worth giving the greatest consideration.

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Hi @DrBormental,

Thank you for sharing, and sorry to hear you haven’t had a good experience with Negative Lab Pro.

This forum exists (at least in part) to help diagnose and fix issues that users are having.

Issues with color can arise from a number of different places. Sometimes the issue can be easily fixed with a tweak to the users digitization equipment (for instance, getting a light table with a better CRI), or by better learning how to use the controls within Negative Lab Pro for adjusting and balancing color.

Other times, though, by examining an issue, I find things that need to be updated inside of Negative Lab Pro itself.

One issue that I’ve found from users who have sent me raw samples has to do with the way that the current Negative Lab Pro camera profiles (v2.0) work with newer Canon and Sony cameras (like your 5D Mk4). In most cases, the problem has been solved by getting a better light table, but the fact that the issue seems to occur more regularly with certain camera models has caused me to experiment more with the profile creation process, into areas that are not currently documented by Adobe.

From digging into this more, I’ve developed an entirely new profile version which will be included for free in version 2.3. It’s uses a different approach that is more resilient across camera models. Here’s an example from a Canon 6D… the left is using the current profile version, the right is the new profile from v2.3.

nlp2-2vsnlp2-3
nlp2-2vsnlp2-32186×1354 186 KB

And just to compare, here is the new profile vs the Camera Faithful profile…

camera-faithful-vs-nlp-2-3
camera-faithful-vs-nlp-2-32118×1334 177 KB

You can see here that Camera Faithful has produced some of the same off colors, particularly in the shadow of the skin on the neck.

(Camera Faithful will be a “more neutral” starting point than the other adobe camera profiles, HOWEVER, it is still intended to be used for positive images, and contains elements within it (like Tone Profiles and Look Tables) that are optimized for positive images. So even though Camera Faithful will be a better starting point that, say, Adobe Color or Camera Standard, it will still distort the negative results.)

So I do want existing users to know that using “Color Model: None” may have some unexpected results. “Color Model: None” simply leaves the camera profile at whatever the user had selected prior to launching Negative Lab Pro. Which is useful for users who want to make their own profile, or experiment with other profiles. But the results will vary considerably based on what camera profile you select prior to launching Negative Lab Pro.

Of course, you should follow the path that gets you the results you want! But I take your feedback very seriously, and I do want to make sure that I’m able to address any color issues you’ve had.

I’d be happy to chat further via email (nate@natephotographic.com) and look at any raw images you have had issues with. The more input and data I have, the better I can make Negative Lab Pro for everyone!

Thanks!
-Nate
Creator of Negative Lab Pro

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As a Sony A7Riv user I’ve been eagerly awaiting these new profiles. My experience has been that some film stocks convert beautifully with very little tweaking while others make me want to throw the camera out the window and burn the negatives!

Ektar 100 and Portra 800 just work, delivering excellent results even with saturation on 5, while Portra 400 occasionally gets weird, especially in blue skies: The colors shift across the frame, looking like the mid screen blues are hitting a gamut brick wall. Dropping saturation down to 2 or 3 helps, but that kills the vibrant colors I prefer.

I find pushing digitization exposure hard to the right helps, which is counterintuitive since those exposures are supposed (?) to cause LR highlight protective rolloff to kick in. There is also some weirdness seen occasionally with, I suspect, vignetting corrections baked into the raw file; or at least baked into the raw file metadata. When the problem strikes, the edges become super dark and saturated relative to the middle of the frame. But it’s not consistent. Lens is the Sony 90 macro, light table is homebrew using Waveform 99 CRI LEDs.

FWIW, when Portra 400 decides to be difficult I usually see strong cyan casts prior to doing any sort of auto color from within the plug-in. Another data point: I always WB off the rebate prior to conversion. I’ve tried omitting that step as an xperiment and results are uniformly awful. As expected.

Anyway, I’m grateful for the work you’re doing and I suspect the new profiles are going to be a big help based on what you’ve shared so far.

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@nate thank you so much for a detailed response. To clarify: NLP works really well for me, my comment only stated that I am getting to a desired state much faster with the NONE setting, but apparently I did not realize how much specific this is to a camera.

Separately, I have tried using NLP with Sony’s latest edition of a7R IVa and the colors are way off by default, with “Profile missing” warning shown in Lightroom right under “Negative Lab v2.0” profile dropdown.