“I’m getting a weird issues when I sync my Negative Lab Pro conversion over to Lightroom CC Mobile or try to share the raw library online. I either get an error message or the images displayed do not look correct (even though they look correct in Lightroom Classic CC), or they appear really dark with weird colors. They look fine when I see them where I originally converted them.”
What’s Happening:
Lightroom Mobile CC needs the underlying “Negative Lab Pro” camera profiles to correctly display converted files. Unfortunately, the profiles will not automatically sync from Lightroom Classic CC or Lightroom CC 2015 and earlier. They will only sync from Lightroom CC Desktop (thanks Adobe, haha!)
How to Fix
To fix this, you need to do the following:
Open up Lightroom CC Desktop (not Lightroom Classic - unfortunately you can’t do this in Lightroom Classic - if you don’t have Lightroom CC Desktop, it should be a part of your Creative Cloud subscription and you can download it)
Go to “File > Import Profiles and Presets”
Add the “Negative Lab Pro” camera / scanner profiles you use. If you are on Mac, you can find these at: [Macintosh HD] / Library / Application Support / Adobe / CameraRaw / CameraProfiles /…
If you are Windows, you can find these at: C: \ Users \ [username] \ AppData \ Roaming \ Adobe \ CameraRaw / CameraProfiles /
Once the profiles have been imported and allowed to sync, any devices connected to the same account (including other desktops, iPhone, iPad, Android, and ChromeOS devices) will have those profiles available.
Alternative Method
While you should only have to do the above steps once, it is a bit cumbersome.
Another option is to use Negative Lab Pro’s “make copy” feature, and make a tiff or jpeg copy of the images you want to sync. The positive copy will not rely on the Negative Lab Pro profiles, so there is no issue with display on other devices. It will also enable you to use the regular Lightroom controls in Lightroom CC Mobile.
This is my only issue with using Negative lab pro, even after following the steps above and applying the profile to cc desktop the mobile version on ipad still doesn’t auto detect the correct profile even though its installed, when I do apply the profile manually there are lots of issues trying to copy and paste the profile to other photos to quicken the process, one by one seems to be the only way and even after all that the previews are very hit and miss to update to the new version…
Love the app by the way, but I would be so happy if this could be fixed!
I wonder if this is the case even when you import NEW conversions made with Negative Lab Pro (now that you have the profile available?). I have heard that the previews on previously imported images may take some cajoling to get to re-render if you imported them previously to having the camera profile available… You could also try removing the previous synced conversions, and then re-syncing from scratch…
Even new ones still come out really dark, especially the thumbnails. When I got into the full screen on Lightroom mobile, it does convert correctly, but not every time.
The thumbnails remain the same through, and next time I go into that photo, it has gone back to the non profile version.
Any suggestion, otherwise I will have to resort to converting all the DNGs to TIF, which starts to limit the convenience of the raw file type?
I’m having a similar issue and I opted for tiff or jpg files. I do have a question in regards t what is actually happening during this process on Lightroom cc. In a couple cases I actually prefer the “messed up/darker” version of some of my b&w photos. Is there a way to achieve this look on Lightroom classic by tweaking it with the NLP plugin?
For example in this case - I prefer the darker more contrasts version. I’ve tried messing a bit with the tones and but haven’t been able to achieve these exact results.
You could achieve the same result in Lightroom Classic by just changing the camera profile to Adobe Standard after you’ve already done the conversion in Negative Lab Pro. This will produce this darker look because the Adobe Standard profile has a tone curve in it that brightens the negative (and thus, darkens the result once reversed). If you’re seeing this in Lightroom Mobile, it’s because it doesn’t have access to the Negative Lab Pro linear profile, and thus defaults back to Adobe Standard. This can look pretty cool in black and white as you’ve discovered, but will cause other hue issues in color negatives. Also, you should be able to achieve a similar look in NLP v2.1 once it is out, since it gives you more control over the white and black clipping points.
I also experience this problem. It seems that the solution you provide in this thread does not apply anymore to version 2.1. I cannot find the NLP camera/scanner profiles in my original download.
Any ideas on how to fix the colors on my mobile devices?
Also, can I remove Lr CC from my Mac after I’ve done this? I only use classic on my Mac and the mobile app on my iPhone and iPad.
And then in “NegativeLab Camera Profiles” or “Vuescan Profiles” depending on how you’re capturing your negatives.
Ultimately this is how Adobe has designed their software. If you want Nate’s custom profiles to work in Lightroom mobile, you need to follow Nate’s steps above, which are the same as the steps officially provided by Adobe:
As Julieanne states in her blog, you are welcome to remove Lr CC from your computer after the profiles have synced. But if Nate ever updates the profiles in a future version of NLP then you’ll need to download Lr CC again and follow the manual import procedure to get the new profiles synced to the cloud.
After following all these steps, my color images still have a pretty dramatic color shift on Mobile. . I can get it pretty close to original by going in, photo by photo, and changing the white balance. This is not ideal tho.
Has anyone found a more effective way of syncing Mobile? Would be super helpful and easier than making TIFF copies of everything…
I’ve imported all profiles into both programs, and I’m running the latest version of NLP. I should note that though I’ve installed the latest updates to NLP, the profile still reads “Negative Lab Pro 2.0” instead of “2.1.2”, tho I don’t know if that is an issue or normal…Also, both Classic and CC display the NLP profile and in this same way.
Here’s a comparison of what LR is doing with the colors:
I also still have some problems here… The previews in lightroom mobile still show the incorrect profile. Any tips on how to make lightroom show the thumbnails/previews of previously imported images correctly?
I have the same problem with the current version. As far as I see, the correct profile is set in LR mobile but not used for generating the previews. When I toggle with another profile, the previews are rendered correctly, but after restarting LR mobile the wrong previews are regenerated again. I have no problems with other third party profiles like the ones from RNI for example.
So you see that the Negative Lab Pro profile is set on the image, but will not display correctly unless you change the profile to something else, then back to the Negative Lab Pro profile?
I’m not aware of any reason that other profiles wouldn’t have this behavior if the NLP profiles do… my guess would be that the RNI “camera profiles” are making much more subtle changes, and therefore it would be harder to perceive any differences.
Another possibility may have to do with the order that things are synced… for instance, if you synced the images first, and then later synced the underlying profile, I could say that effecting the way that LR caches the image previews…
Yes, exactely. But the change does not stick. Switching to another image or going back to grid view reverts the preview most of the times.
I have done some testing and the RNI profiles behave differently. The change in the previews is subtle, but you can see it, if you look for it.
I have thought about that, too. That is why I first synced the profile and checked, if the profile is visible on LR mobile, before I synced any images with the Negativ Lab v2.0 profile applied.
Hey Nate, trying to move the profiles from Classic to CC, I have imported the scanner and camera profiles but am still not getting good results. In CC, it’s showing me that the Negative Lab Pro plugin is missing.
While I can locate the camera and scanner profiles, I’m wondering if there’s an actual place where the negative lab pro profile lives, or how I might go about trying to fix this.
Thank you for your time, I’m loving Negative Lab Pro so far.
Hmm… that’s strange… if you click the profile dropdown in your screenshot, then click “Browse All Profiles” do you see “Negative Lab v2.1” as an option? If you do, try cycling between “Adobe Color” and back to “Negative Lab v2.1” and see if that fixes it.
If you don’t see Negative Lab v2.1" listed as an option, you will need to try to add it again.
In Lightroom Classic (and Lightroom 6) the profiles “live” inside a designated folder location:
In your case, you will want to import all the profiles in the “Vuescan Profiles” folder - as this is what contains the the Silverfast and Vuescan specific profiles. Do NOT try to import just the profile you think you need, as the naming between the SF and Vuescan profiles is a bit confusing. Just import the whole folder.
In terms of Lightroom CC 2019/2020, once you import the camera profiles, they do not go into a typical standard folder, which is why you need to use their import dialog to manage profiles.
The whole thing is a bit annoying to say the least But hopefully that helps!
My lightroom classic is missing Negative Lab Camera Profiles but i can find these folders in finder. It shows only Color and Monochrome profiles as you can see in the photo.
and all of my scans conversions are so blue but if i scan with Epson software, colours are normal. Is that because of color profile missing? What can i do to appear these NLP Camera profiles in my LR Classic(v 9.3).
Thank you. Looking forward to hearing your reply. Have a good day.
Hi, what scanner/scanning software are you using? I’m guessing these are either Vuescan or Silverfast RAWs?
If you are not seeing the profiles, there are two possibilities:
You may just need to run the “Update Vuescan/Silverfast DNG” utility. In Lightroom, go to “file > plugin extras > Update Vuescan/Silverfast DNG” and then follow the instructions. This utility basically updates the metadata on the DNG to help it find the right profile… it isn’t needed for all scanners, but it is needed for some scanners. You can run it on a group of photos all at once, so you don’t need to run it on each photo individually.
If #1 doesn’t appear to work, try restarting Lightroom after running the utility and see if it now recognizes the profile (there seems to be a glitch sometimes with Lightroom that I still haven’t been able to replicate, but restarting seems to fix).
If #1 and #2 doesn’t solve it, it possible that the profiles haven’t been loaded into the right place. In that case, in Lightroom go to “File > Import Develop Profiles and Presets…” and then load the profiles again from there.
But hopefully that helps!