I have been a NLP user for the last few years and it truly is an impressive piece of software. I have processed thousands of negatives through it and got my process down pat. Enter trichromatic scanning… for me it’s impossible to unsee the benefits for my workflow. For the past few months I have been using both but have recently fully made the switch. Honestly diving into trichromes has made me appreciate NLP even more. What it was able to pull out of some problematic negatives is impressive. Hats off to Nate.
Here is an example. On the left is a 95 CRI white light capture processed with NLP and simply edited using my standard process. On the right is a combined sequential RGB capture inverted manually with contrast tweaks but no color correction. Seeing what my negatives ‘actually’ look like has been eye opening.
I will make more edits to the right one and it may even end up looking like the left but the fact that the look isn’t baked in is what has been an unexpected joy. I also know that for a lot of people the left image looks closer to what you would expect to get back from a lab and that’s what NLP does so well. For me I am looking for more flexibility these days and trichromatic scanning has provided it.
Does this mean that you’re not using Lightroom? I suspect that it does. If that is true then how easy would it be for you to use your method to ‘process’ all the exposures in a roll using your method?
For whole rolls of 35mm you can use something like this. I had Claude build me a little applet that is super lightweight and just does the simple parts of the inversions with no editing capabilities. I’ll happily share it with you if you are interested.
4x5 and 120 is usually in photoshop for the added control it provides.
Thanks, that looks like a good potential workflow to adopt for those with a suitable light source. Is it dedicated to just one RGB light source, have you made your own? Only a couple of months ago I see you were using the Cinestill CS-Lite+ Spectracolor but presumably now you have changed from that?
There was the suggestion that Nate would be looking at accomodating RGB light sources in NLP, from Nate himself I think. Whether or not the new Standalone NLP version will do this remains to be seen, as is how it will manage without the basic functionality built into Lightroom regarding the Develop module, setups, syncing etc. On the face of it it is looking as if RGB light sources have the potential to make the colour processing much simpler.
The conversion process for the trichromatic scans is so basic that it doesn’t require the digital ‘magic’ that NLP was so innovative with. I could see there being some real utility to having the RGB sequential capture side of a standalone be the color science side of the equation. Profiles for frontiers, noritsus, etc.
I am using the big scanlight from jackw01. He has this great web app that makes it easy to trim the RGB intensities and automatically capture the three sequential frames. It even has IR if you can take advantage of that.
Has Analogue Toolbox improved since the beta version a couple of months ago? I tried it out, and while it wasn’t bad, it was a bit hard to dial in and kind of slow and clunky. I couldn’t imagine processing a whole roll or batch of multiple rolls with it.
NegPy also now has a trichromatic feature, but I have not tried it yet. I have the same scanlight and have just been using it for single exposures in C1 with great results.
I have never tried Analog Toolbox so I can’t say. NegPy is an amazingly capable open source project and is actually what the maker of my light recommends. If I was just starting out with negative scanning this is definitely what I would use. It has some amazing features which are similar to the ethos of NLP which help you get your scans to look more like lab results pretty easily. For me, I basically have my editing down pat so the features are less enticing. If someone asked me to dev and scan a roll for them I would be tempted to run it through NegPy just for the time savings.
