Use lens correction profiles for my film camera

Flatbed and Film Scanners
1

Hey there,
I am using a Plustek 8200i SE to scan all my photos as 48Bit HDR RAW which I will then convert using NLP.

I want to start using Lens Correction Profiles for my Voigtländer lens I use on my film camera. How do I correctly integrate this into the NLP workflow?
Before the conversion or after?
On the negative or a positive copy?

Kind regards, Felix

2

Hey Felix – Welcome to the forum!

Lens corrections are ideally done in this order (if any at all):

  1. apply lens corrections on negatives to correct anything from scanning
  2. apply lens corrections on positives to correct taking lenses on your camera

(1) does not apply to you as you’re using a Plustek scanner, so on the positive it is.

Best,
Chris

3

Thank you for your answer!

4

Ok, I got another question.
After I convert the pictures using NLP and save a positive copy Lightroom does not show me normal lenses anymore but only Smartphones to select from. Do you have any idea how to fix it?

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5

What kind of issues are you trying to remedy with the lens profile?

  • chromatic aberrations?
  • falloff / vignetting?
  • uneven sharpness?
  • other?

Taking the photo on negative film with your lens means that some of the above has been baked into the negative. In order to correct such issues, the lens correction profile should be applied before the conversion to positive.

6

I haven’t done a lot with lens corrections so far, since I am still a novice. I want to fix some wonky lines and vignetting.

7

Scanned image files should allow you to select the lens profile - if it exists.
Apply the profile to your scan before conversion and check if it makes a big enough difference.

Please note that the profiles are made for images captured by cameras. Applying a profile to a Plustek scan might still work, but then again maybe not necessarily in the way one would expect.

8

The easiest way should be creating a preset only including the lens profile correction you want. Apply the preset before conversion.

I’m not sure about how the lens profiles works for Voigtlander lenses, but for film only the distortion correction is meaningful. I know some other lens correction in LR designed for digital camera use also include CA/color shift correction and etc, which makes no sense for film digitalization with a scanner. Personally I won’t trouble to use the lens profile correction. If there’s significant distortion caused by the lens, I will use thr transform tool to correct it manually.