Hi,
A couple of things.
- You have enough dust on there to actually throw off the conversion. NLP will tolerate a little bit of dust during conversion, but if there is enough, it will think that the dust is a part of the film and throw off the analysis. You should use an air blower or anti-static brush across the film prior to “scanning.” You can also crop in to an area that does not have prominent dust, and is more or less representative of the tones in the pictures, which is what I have done in my conversion.
- Use a dedicated macro lens. I’m not sure what lens you are using, but in the metadata of the file, it does not show a model, and Lightroom does not automatically find a lens correction profile. You will get much better results if you use a dedicated macro lens.
- If the contrast is too high, try starting with the “linear” tone profile.
- Also, images with a lot of specular highlights are more difficult to convert, as by default NLP will try to retain the detail in the highlight. You can crop these out as well before the conversion.
Here’s my conversion and edit using just NLP.
Note that I cropped in to an area that did not have dust or specular highlights in it prior to converting. And my pre-conversion settings were “standard” color model, pre-saturation: 3. Also note that in this case I have left the white balance to daylight in Lightroom (5500k) prior to conversion. I’d be curious to know which iPhone or iPad you were using for illumination, as well as what film you were scanning, and is in this case, it appears to do a bit better without white balance correction prior to conversion.
-Nate