You should make a big deal out of this. I’ve been hoping for (and asked) a solution to this for a while. It’s a game changer for those of us that scan black and white and would rather use dng files over tiff.
Hello Nate,
could you please upload the template in the old lrtemplate format because i am using a older version of lightroom.
Thanks a lot
Franz
Hi Nate
thank you very much
Hi Nate,
I’m scanning with Vuescan and saving 48bit DNG, just as tutorial says. The results have been great. I have just one question: can I use the Infrared Cleaning for dust removal even for Black and White Negatives? I’m scanning with an Epson V700.
You cannot use dust removal for B&W as it uses infrared to scan for the dust, the silver in the film will show on the infrared and cause issues
I’m scanning color negatives in slide mode with Vuescan. In the color tab on vuescan, what should the color balance be set to, if anything. I’ve been leaving it in manual mode with a “linear” curve. Should it be off all together?
It shoudn’t make a difference. When you do a RAW DNG scan, it completely ignores any settings you have in the color tab in Vuescan.
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Hi Nate,
Once in a while, I’ll get a vuescan dng that refuses to convert. It would just go through converting negative dialog and then goes back to the convert tab with all of the conversion fields blanked out.
Here’s one of the negative that has that issue. The other dng from the same batch scan does not.
Hi @Ansch ,
Thanks for sending the sample file. Just tried it out and worked fine on my end…
The issue probably likely has to do with corruption of the metadata that gets associated with the image via the Lightroom Catalog.
To help me diagnose what exactly is wrong with the catalog metadata, it would be helpful to try the following:
- Select just this photo in Lightroom
- Go to “file > export as catalog”
- Follow the prompts to save as a catalog.
- Share the one image catalog with me and I will take a look to see if it give any clues as to why this is happening.
Also, a quick way to fix this in the future is to go to “photo > remove photo from catalog” (which just removes the catalog entry but keeps the file on your harddrive). Then in the library module, right click on the folder that this image was within and select “Synchronize Folder” - which will then freshly reimport the photo you removed. This should reset the metadata associated with the photo in the catalog.
-Nate
Hi @nate , Thanks for the quick reply.
Here’s the save as catalog for the one photo (Dropbox - NLP_test.zip - Simplify your life)
I’ve tried your fix method and it also worked. I’ve been copying and pasting the crop and WB settings from the other frames in the roll so something must have messed up the metadata because when I go through the manual process of setting WB and crop for this photo, it converted fine.
Thank you for your help!
Hi Nate,
I am using the Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV with Vuescan and for some reason when I try to white balance the negative with the border, it always says “This area is too bright,” any ideas why that is? And what alternatives do I have to this step if there is no solution?
If you get this message, you can try a couple of different things:
- Auto White Balance - you can use Lightroom’s auto white balance and that usually does the trick. If you’re working with a batch of photos, you’ll just want to take the resulting white balance output and copy it to the other photos (in other words, if the auto white balance is 2800K and -10 tint, you want those exact numbers on the rest of your photos in the batch. If you just copy “auto”, there could be small differences in white balance for each of the photos, which you don’t want).
- Manual White Balance - you can also just manually adjust the white balance until you start to see the right-edge of the histogram line up between the color channels.
Hi Nate,
Thanks a lot for this, it’s really helpful as I scanned a load of black and white negatives in 16 bit before seeing that 48 bit would have been better.
Just a question on this, though: if I’m using 16 bit files, is it necessary to run File > Plugin-Extras > Update Vuescan/Silverfast DNGs before applying your 16-bit mono DNG preset, or is this now irrelevant? (I tried doing so but it didn’t change anything in Lightroom - I’m using Lightroom 6 and the Profile tab remains grayed out).
Batch Scanning
Hello,
I’m trying to save my self some time by not having to babysit my scanner and scan each frame individually. Since the Batch scanning option in VueScan itself is a mess and it doesn’t allow me to scan all the 6 images that fit in the holder im trying a different approach.
Instead of scanning one frame at a time, I just select the whole strip (6 negatives) and let it scan as one big RAW DNG.
The only issue is that I don’t know how to cut this one file that contains 6 negatives into 6 files afterwards without losing any of the information, so that I can use it with NLP? Does anyone have an idea? Would greatly appreciate it, since it would save me a lot of time and give me back some joy in scanning.
Yes, however it almost crashes Lightroom and becomes basically unusable
Export the VCs and apply NLP to the exported files?
will that keep the information in a RAW DNG format?
Go ahead and try it. Nothing beats personal experience. I usually test with virtual copies, but not based on the huge file that you have to deal with…