I have been working with Negative Lab Pro V2.3 on the trial mode just with the RAW files included and one question that has popped to mind is when scanning in different film stock for example Kodak Gold 200 and Portra 400 for example. Will NLP recognise their original colours so their will be a distinguishable difference in colour that you typically would see with different film stock?
If I scan in using my digital camera I’ll be using the Canon M6 Mark II on a Manfrotto Tripod with a light panel underneath.
Well I must say that I was rather hoping that someone would chip in with a reply to you. You are right to suggest that back in the day each of the colour negative films did have a distinctive look (and they were marketed as such) since they were processed in standardised chemistry and then printed on to a relatively small range of colour printing papers, again using standardised chemistry. The most obvious differences were in contrast, typically the wedding operator wanting to preserve the tones in the dress whereas the ‘commercial’ photographer often wanted more punch. Now that the colour negative is ‘scanned’ with either a camera or a scanner you have far more control using software like NLP but perhaps you lose the original look that the manufacturer intended. I see in fact that NLP provides ‘LUT’ options that instead emulate the look from certain scanners (Frontier Or Pakon) and also one supposed to emulate Fuji Crystal Archive paper (but only for version 8 and over of Lightrom Classic).
NLP does not know what kind of negative it processes and does what it does based on what it gets. This means that an object, taken with different films but under constant lighting conditions, will come out differently - but I doubt that what you’ll see corresponds to what you’d see if you had these shots developed and printed by a “chemical” lab.
All my negatives and corresponding prints are at least 25 years old, have been developed in different countries by different labs. Kodak negatives should look kodak-ish nevertheless - but I don’t really care, because I want to make these images look like I want them to look anyway.
Thank you I’ve had a play around with a couple of “scans” from my mirrorless, using the Frontier mode I one shot I actually managed with a little tweaking more or less replicated the version I got from the lab. It seems the Kodak white balance is good for Kodak Gold 200.
Thank you, yeah Kodak negatives do seem to have the Kodak look from what I’ve experimented with so far, though only tested Kodak Gold 200 scans as of right now, I have some Ultramax 400 rolls currently being developed so I’ll have to experiment with those when I get them back.
I’ve wonderd this too. It would be nice if there were an option to select the film stock in NLP and for it to take a film’s natural charactersitics into consideration when converting.