That’s another time I’m facing this issue so i decided to create an account in here and ask about that. Sorry if such topic already exists, it’s really hard to come up with search keywords for that
Anyway, i’m scanning all my photos of a roll with the same settings and there are usually several ones per roll that has this very weird color shifts, high contrast and are very grainy after converting them with NLP. Here are two photos from the same roll scanned using the exact same settings both on camera and NLP.
This one has proper colors and grain and can be easily retouched:
To be completely honest - the example above is not the most drastic one, it actually turned out relatively good. Normally the photo is basically super pink, color grain is huge and there are a lot of things that looks like a flares/soup artifacts near the edges (i assume they are coming from perforation holes)
If you like this one, you can use it as the conversion base for the other image… to do this
Select this image (the one that you like)
Additionally select the image that did not convert well.
Open Negative Lab Pro, and in the Edit tab, select “Sync Scene” (towards the bottom). This will sync the conversion analysis and settings from the first image to the second.
If further changes are needed, you can then navigate to the second image, and adjust the settings in Negative Lab Pro further.
If you want to try to correct manually (rather than syncing as shown above), then do the following:
“Weird pink tint” - just add green to the “tint” in Negative Lab Pro
"RGB grain" - in Lightroom, go to the Detail pane and use the “noise reduction” settings to make the grain less visible.
“is overexposed” - Lower the exposure in Negative Lab Pro
“contrast seems to be quite off” - Adjust the contrast slider in Negative Lab Pro
If you want to try to replicate this, then try this:
Add Lab Glow and Lab Fade to taste in Negative Lab Pro. This will compress the tonality similar to how it is compressed in this image.
Go to the "highlights’ color section in Negative Lab Pro and add yellow to match the extra yellowness in the snow and sky of this scan.
@nate thank you for your comprehensive reply! It’s all very useful (especially the sync scene feature) and i will definitely try it all out but that’s not really what i was asking for.
The thing is, it all adds another step into the process so i was rather wondering why is it even happening, to try to maybe understand it and change the way i scan the negatives Because i can obviously try to fix it all in post but it would just be far more convenient to prevent it from happening in the first place.
Here is the more drastic example i mentioned in my previous post:
Entire roll scanned the same way with the same settings, negative has no any visible signs of damage nor anything unusual. Most of the photos looks good but there are like 5 that looks like the one above - massive grain, ugly colors and this weird yellow stains at the bottom.
Just to make it clear - I’m generally loving the NLP product, just wondering if i can help it to prevent these things from happening. If thats a normal thing though i can also live with that
If this were present on the physical negative, it would be very difficult to spot. On the physical negative, you would not notice a color difference (due to the orange mask) and the difference in tone would be very slight (as the contrast on the negative is quite low and gets expanded during conversion).
But, assuming that it isn’t on the physical negative, the next thing to check would be your setup…
First, make sure to thoroughly clean the Pixl-latr’s built-in diffusor. Smudges are difficult to see on the diffusion layer, but can cause uneven lighting (which results in orange smudges like this.
Second, try without the extension tube. I’ve seen extension tubes cause similar issues.
Third, if you aren’t already, make sure you mask out any light that is not directly illuminating your negative. The direct light from around the film or even though the sprocket holes can cause lens flare, which will look like orange smudges in the final image.
Also, I should note, it’s not unusual for only some images in a set to have this type of problem. The thinner a negative is, the more likely you are to see these types of issues pop up.
