I’m working on a Macbook Pro with Lightroom Classic. Camera setup is a Sony A7II / Micro Nikkor 55mm / 5K LED / homemade negative carrier. Mostly old Kodak negatives.
I installed NLP V2 yesterday. I’m thrilled to see all the work on this version. Congratulations & thanks for that. My main problem with v1, that density and color adjustments would affect each other, seems to be fixed. Bravo.
But I’m seeing a new problem:
If I go back to an image that I worked on with V1 and bring up NLP, sometimes it tells me that I have to un-convert before I can make changes (“You must unconvert then reconvert this image to enable AutoColor 2.0.”) Even if I don’t want to enable AutoColor, I can’t get past that warning. But this doesn’t happen every time. Sometimes I can make modifications to the image and continue the work I started in v1. And sometimes (most of the time?), even if NLP doesn’t insist on starting over, it dramatically changes the color of the image as soon as it opens.
I need to be able to work on images that I’ve carefully adjusted in v1. What am I doing wrong?
I would typically recommend you make a virtual copy of the previous conversion, and then do a reconversion on the original to take advantage of all the improvements in v2.0. But I understand that there are times when you want to go back and just make a small tweak…
First, it shouldn’t give you the AutoColor 2.0 notification unless you explicitly try to select an AutoColor 2.0 correction… but if you do see that, take a peek at what the “film color” adjustment is set to, and maybe set it to “none” or “custom” and you shouldn’t see that warning anymore unless you try to select an AutoColor 2.0 setting. As the warning explains, you need to reconvert the image if you want to use an AutoColor 2.0 setting for color film correction - the reason for this is that all the analysis on a photo takes places during the conversion, so in order to have that analysis done for AutoColor 2.0, you need to reconvert.
In terms of the image changing when you open it up, I understand that that is frustrating if you just want to make a little change…
The issue is that de-coupling the density and color adjustments will have an impact on previously converted images… for instance, you may have the color adjustment just where you want in from a previous version, but previously you had to compensate for hue shifts happening, and now that those are gone, it has a different hue to it. Also, the new Tone Profiles have a form of Auto-Tone built in, so you may find the brightness is changing - again this will improve new conversions, but may throw off old images.
All that to say, probably the easiest way to make tiny fixes to negatives converted with a previous version is as follows:
In Lightroom, Select the images from earlier versions you want to make small tweaks to
Go to “file > export”
In the export dialog, use the settings below to make copies that will be automatically reimported into your Lightroom catalog (of course, feel free to modify to suit your needs!)
You will then be able to make very fine tuned adjustments on this images using Lightroom’s own tools.
Another option is that you could maintain a copy of an earlier version of NLP in a different folder, and switch it to that version in the plugin manager when you wanted to make a small tweak to a previously converted photo.
I realize this isn’t ideal, but I needed to rip the bandaid off a bit with some of the color shift issues in v1.
