It’s been a while since I’ve been in a color darkroom, but I’m planning to rent a room in the coming weeks. Can someone recommend an NLP setting that will accurately let me preview what my negs will actually look like printed (on standard glossy Fuji paper)? The obvious solution would be to use the Fuji Crystal setting, but to my eye it seems higher contrast than I remember real prints to be. In fact I remember always being a little disappointed at the contrast in my RA4 prints, but like I said, it’s been a while.
The Fuji Crystal profiles emulate fuji scanner output. Print emulation can be done in Lightroom with softproofing and appropriate profiles for the intended printer/paper combo.
With a lot of trial-and error iterations, you should be able to find the necessary settings…but having someone else provide the info would be really nice indeed. Not sure how long you’d want to wait for that specific input though.
I talking about analog printing, not soft proofing for digital printing. Basically want to approximate the contrast of an optical print to RA4 paper.
You would have to make an RA4 print, then adjust the digital image to match it and save the settings as a preset in Lightroom. I don’t think it would be of much use as there would be a large negative to negative variation.
With RA4 printing you can only change the colour balance, and it needs the negatives to be processed within very tight tolerances. Any deviation in the negative is easy to correct in digital post processing, but impossible to correct in wet printing.
Yes, and as far as I understand your text, you want to use Lightroom and NLP to preview how a chemical print will look if it is produced by projecting the negative through an enlarger and the paper developed chemically.
Is this what you want to do?
Exactly! The huge range of contrast available in NLP makes it difficult to previsualize.
The Way the images come to live in chemical and digital processing depends on many things that are completely unrelated across the two ways. Imo, learning how to make chemical prints will advance you further than investing time in a loosely coupled simulation and the related uncertainty.
Not investing time in a digital simulation, and I’ve been making chemical prints for 25 years. The images get scanned as a preview either way. NLP is the wild card.