I recently shot a roll of Portra 400 in my backyard and am getting pretty bad color casts on every conversion. This is by far the worst though. I can get the image to look halfway decent if I export as a tiff and edit the heck out of it, but I was wondering if I am doing something wrong or if this is a limitation of NLP.
Hi,
Something has definitely gone wrong (or a couple of things).
First, I notice that the “Profile” is still set to “Adobe Color.” When you first bring up Negative Lab Pro on the unconverted file, it should change this to “Negative Lab v2.0”. If you don’t see this, make sure the “Color Model” is set to either “basic”, “frontier” or “noritsu.” If this doesn’t change the profile to Negative Lab v2.0 profile, then something is wrong.
Second, and probably more importantly, there is a large area of non-film that is showing in your crop (the area that shows up as pure black before the conversion). You either need to crop this out before you convert, or increase the “border buffer” percentage so that it is not included in the analysis.
Negative Lab Pro works by analyzing the film. If there are non-film objects in you cropped area, that can throw off the conversion. If you set the border buffer higher (like 15%), it will ignore the outer 15% of the image around the border area during conversion, and it should turn out better.
So, to fix this, select the image, open Negative Lab Pro, go to the “convert” tab, and select the “unconvert” option (underneath the convert button). Then increase the border buffer to 15% or so, and then hit “convert”.
If you’re still having trouble after this, feel free to leave a link or send me a private message with the original RAW and I will show you.
Cheers!
-Nate
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Also, white balance is “As Shot”. According to the manual, WB should be taken off an unexposed part of the film. I have found that it can work without setting WB first though. Taking the WB from the unexposed part just left of your image might help.