fjablo wrote:
Not sure if NLP can be fooled by this - easiest is try by taking two pics of the same negative
It should *not* have an impact as long as none of your color channels is clipping. NLP works on the raw file and shifts white balance a lot anyway. The idea behind the cool light source is that you get a bit more signal to noise ratio in your green and blue color channels, which would otherwise be underexposed a lot given the orange mask.
Learned a bunch tonight. I tried all permutations of a photo with a cool backlight, a photo with a white backlight, and inversions with NLP using frontier or noritsu color models, and whether I set NLP white balance to "auto-neutral" or off (testing @Desmolicious comments). I skipped the extra dropper white balancing too.
What I found was that the crummy place I had originally edited from was the result of me unthinkingly inverting BEFORE I cropped to just the square negative. I'm scanning square images with a 3:2 aspect ratio camera. So, there are big areas of the negative that are black, which has to trip up NLP. This process doesn't negatively impact black and white.
Landed on this: for color negative, the cool backlight setting -> crop to the actual negative (a square here) -> invert with NLP defaulting to auto-neutral wb. This is using the "LAB - Standard" tone profile in NLP. No edits, all sliders untouched. Better?
Cloud75 wrote:
Learned a bunch tonight. I tried all permutations of a photo with a cool backlight, a photo with a white backlight, and inversions with NLP using frontier or noritsu color models, and whether I set NLP white balance to "auto-neutral" or off (testing @Desmolicious@ comments). I skipped the extra dropper white balancing too.
What I found was that the crummy place I had originally edited from was the result of me unthinkingly inverting BEFORE I cropped to just the square negative. I'm scanning square images with a 3:2 aspect ratio camera. So, there are big areas of the negative that are black, which has to trip up NLP. This process doesn't negatively impact black and white.
Landed on this: for color negative, the cool backlight setting -> crop to the actual negative (a square here) -> invert with NLP defaulting to auto-neutral wb. This is using the "LAB - Standard" tone profile in NLP. No edits, all sliders untouched. Better?
Cloud75 wrote:
Learned a bunch tonight. I tried all permutations of a photo with a cool backlight, a photo with a white backlight, and inversions with NLP using frontier or noritsu color models, and whether I set NLP white balance to "auto-neutral" or off (testing @Desmolicious@ comments). I skipped the extra dropper white balancing too.
What I found was that the crummy place I had originally edited from was the result of me unthinkingly inverting BEFORE I cropped to just the square negative. I'm scanning square images with a 3:2 aspect ratio camera. So, there are big areas of the negative that are black, which has to trip up NLP. This process doesn't negatively impact black and white.
Landed on this: for color negative, the cool backlight setting -> crop to the actual negative (a square here) -> invert with NLP defaulting to auto-neutral wb. This is using the "LAB - Standard" tone profile in NLP. No edits, all sliders untouched. Better?
I've found that every choice bakes in a specific look that is hard to change or adjust later on. Most of my pics get additional minor adjustments in LR.
Another thing that really helps is to only convert pics from a single photo shoot/lighting scenario in the same batch. It helps make the conversion better, and it makes it easier to just adjust one pic and sync the settings to the others.
Here are the Setting I use:
Convert
Basic Color Model 99% of the time, sometimes None will fix bad color shifts
Pre-Saturation - 2
Roll Analysis on
Roll Process - Pro Lab
Adjust Border Buffer so that only exposed negative is visible (be sure to exclude sprocket holes and DX edge coding)
Edit
Settings - NLP Standard
Tone Profile - This is the main decision I make, I pretty much always cycle through all the options for every batch I convert. Sometimes they all get the same one, other times it's different for specific photos. The ones I end up using the most are LAB - Standard, LINEAR, LINEAR - Gamma (especially for B&W), and LINEAR - Deep. The other LAB profiles are good for specific scenarios, e.g., very thin or dense negs or ones that need more/less contrast.
WB - Leave it on Auto-Neutral unless there's an obvious issue, then try other options to get it close enough. Auto-Cool works well sometimes for conversions that are too warm, for example. Final WB adjustment in LR if needed.
HSL - Mostly just leave this on Lab, but sometimes use one of the others for a specific look
Sometimes I'll use the general exposure/contrast sliders, but not always
I never touch any of the other more fine grained options
