Hey folks, I am new to Negative Lab Pro. My goal is to cut down on lab scanning costs and do my own camera based scanning. From my last film (Kodak Ektar 100 - 120 Film) I noticed a strong red cast in my own scans versus flat, muted tones from the Noritsu lab scan (only JPG available). I know I can change the tones both in NLP and in Lightroom. However, I was wondering why such a large tonal difference exists from the beginning - with standard NLP v2.3 settings. I followed the NLP guide and did the WB first on the film edge and cropping before doing the conversion. Please see comparison below. Noritsu lab scan on the left. My own scan on the right.
@Stefan_F I was having the same issue in my first scans (I am still brand new to scanning). I figured out how to fix it, set your cameraâs WB to the lowest Kelvin temperature (coolest) possible, on my Fuji GFX50r which is around 2500K.
I figured this out because I was having the red colour cast on all my scans, and I also noticed the WB slider in Lightroom was at max. So I tried setting the WB to the coolest colour temperature, it seems to fix the colour cast issue, the WB slider is not maxed out in LR, and all the scans have the same WB which makes it much easier to get consistent results.
Another thing could be going into the third tab when you open NLP and adjusting how it sets the WB, setting it to âcolours firstâ can also remove weird problems with casts.
Lastly, the image on the right is waaay, more saturated, and contrasty than the image to the left. Otherwise, I would say the colours/tones are very close, so you might just be able to reduce the saturation and contrast in your scans to match the lab scanâs tones/colours.
Hi @Sethsg, thanks for helping out! I believe the pronounced saturation comes from the Extar film. Iâm also testing Portra. Just for a comparisonâŚ
I read some more about the camera settings for scanning and how to use NLP. When shooting RAW the in-camera WB should not matter. Lightroom adjusts it automatically when importing the images.
These NLP settings helped to get closer to the Noritsu look:
Color Model: Noritsu
Pre-Saturation: 1 - Very Low
Post conversion (on Edit tab)
Tones: LINEAR
However, I believe the biggest impact had retaking the photo with an over exposure of +1 stop. See the result below. Now I can start fine-tuning
I canât help wondering whether you would have been happy with the Noritsu jpeg if you hadnât had the opportunity to camera scan it yourself, does it reflect what you remember of the scene or does your most recent NLP result come closer?
Also wondering if youâve tried each of the colour settings on the CS-Lite. I know Cinestill recommend the coolest (bluest) setting for colour negatives but it would be interesting to see how NLP deals with the different colour temperatures. I did see that Vlad Serebryany tested his CS-Lite with a spectrophotometer and put up the graphs on his âVladâs Test Targetâ FB page on 6th January, the warmest setting had the highest CRI at 98 and a value of 99 for R9.
@Harry, excellent point. I scanned the negative again with the âcoolâ setting on the CS-LITE. With the exact same NLP setting the tone is slightly colder. Here the result for comparison:
On a different day, I photographed the same scenery with a digital camera (Auto WB) with neutral color settings. The result is definitely cooler / more neutral. I would apply a warming filter in post.
I reached a point where I trust my own scan process and will no longer order the lab scans. Iâm glad I ordered the Noritsu scans for a couple film rolls to get a reference point. I liked that Noritsu kept the images desaturated (my personal preference). The slight green cast is easy to fix.
Thanks, those pictures are very helpful. I did wonder, I went to the States back in the eighties and the Noritsu scan reminded me of the freeways in Los Angeles in the smog, âatmosphericâ I suppose you could say! Yes, minor adjustments to either of your later scans with more exposure will give you a good result, perhaps the first attempt might have been a tad under-exposed in fact.
I know that Richard Karash tested the CS-Lite and felt that the coolest setting might help to tame the reds of Ektar, if one wanted to that is (I hope Iâm not paraphrasing him incorrectly there).
