If I have time, I’ll post about that sometime. (Note, I just bought a license for your fabulous tool!!! That Warby Parker school bus photo was taken on my Hasselblad 500cm with the 50mm Zeiss lens, and using Fuji 400h film. To show you what a difference this makes, I’ve included some comparisons later on in this guide. It’s available now at https://www.negativelabpro.com. Report a repair and understand what repairs you are responsible for. Does this process apply at the same way to B&W negatives? Later, I’ll show you how I process my DSLR Scans in an all-raw workflow that produces great results. I’m hoping a new setup and NLP will help me reduce the amount of time I spend scanning and editing images. The way it is designed eliminates some of the most common issues I see with DIY digital camera scanning setups. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! Will your software still work correctly with this DNG file? We've personalised your content based on where we think you are. Omar. Since I already have the Lightroom 6 software loaded on my Mac, will this impact what I already have? Hi Nate, I hope this happens. Cheers! Wow. I watched your video on Youtube, then managed to make my way to your website. By scanning our film with our DSLR, then processing RAW with Negative Lab Pro, we’ve been able to get noticeably improved skin tones, truer color reproduction, and full creative control. Maybe I am glad I did. 4) A painless experience – Most scanning software still looks bad software from the 90s. Yes, there are a few and I’m hearing more and more pop up! Candidate support: selecting an interview slot. 2) Macro Lens:This lens is insane. That’s why there are color correcting tools built in to Negative Lab Pro, with various autocolor analysis and manual color cast controls. Id prefer to just quickly snap them with my phone and convert, that is good enough for a contact sheet. I have been digitizing slides using a Nikon D500 or 800 with the 60 mm/2.8 Nikon lens and the ES-2 Digitizing adaptor. If your biggest hangup is the subscription model, you should still be able to buy a license for Lightroom 6 which isn’t a subscription, and use that with Negative Lab Pro. Comparing a $200 flatbed to literally thousands in camera gear? I’ve tried it twice, checked my junk and trash folders, but have still not received the confirmation email. Hey! These issues are difficult (or impossible) to address by hand as they require edits to the individual R/G/B tone curves, in an inverted space. The highlights and shadows are protected, but overall, the tones feel flat. I have so many questions, and you have answered many. If you taste these different brands side by side, brands you have come to love can be very disappointing. 7MP vs the Fuji/4×5 scan with almost 24MP? Not only will it show us that want to work here, it means you can tailor your responses to demonstrate how your experience and skills fit with what we’re looking for. I was constantly disappointed with the colors I got from my negative scans with a traditional film scanner. Great article. LR is a bit too expensive for a student like me with its subscription model… I’d be happy to buy NLP in that case . Lightroom has an incredible metadata engine, but by default it is missing metadata that is specific to the analog process. Does it have focus peaking? love to try it out. You practiced. Many thanks, What factoring technique did you use to come up with the factors of each polynomial? There are a number of exciting film scanning masks coming real soon, like the pixl-latr and the Negative Supply MK1. Yes, it would convert a TIFF from a DSLR but this is not ideal, since it has already been “baked” with whatever camera profile / WB setting was used when it was made into a tiff. 2. I’ll then probably do as you suggested and merge in Lightroom rather than Photoshop so I can apply the NLP processing on the RAW file. » Skier Sunray Copy Box ($239 includes 35mm mask, 120 mask, diffuser and high-quality LED light source) – If you’re building a digital camera setup from scratch, this is a fantastic solution. Ok, you’ve watched the video already right? It was a long, painful experience, and I honestly never had the patience to make it through an entire roll at once. For photographers who still love shooting analog film (like myself), DSLR Film scanning holds incredible promise. I have about 9,000 frames to digitize (about 300 rolls of 30). The answer to this very good question is “no.” Binary is simply a numeration system for expressing real numbers, while Boolean is a completely different number system (like integer numbers are too irrational numbers, for example). Quick question before I purchase your software. I am positively stoked. Regarding the macro lens, would there be any models/specifications you’d recommend I look for or avoid? “The operator’s subjective decision is critical, so it’s hard to characterize a professional lab scan as representative of anything other than that particular situation”. Extension Tubes As tempting as it is to just take an existing lens and add an extension tube to it to make it a macro, you will NOT get the same results. That’s very kind of you, thanks! Many thanks for your quick and very detailled answer ! As shown in video, make sure it plugged in and at maximum brightness.» Kaiser Slimlite Plano – $109 at Amazon.» Much more insight and discussion on best light tables for DSLR film scanning here. Cheers! Will the software still work? Indeed a great post about it!! If you are doing multi-shoot, is extremely important that your film is perfectly flat and perfectly parallel to camera. It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. I don’t see edge available with my set up. It’s able to do this partially because of it’s custom camera calibration profiles (made specifically for negative development) and it’s image analysis, which is able to set and adjust all three color channels more precisely than can be done by hand. This can work remarkably well, or it can turn into a disaster, depending on the shot’s lighting condition or the film emulsion. They impart their own “look” to the conversions, and to me that’s part of the magic of shooting negative film, and part of what I’ve tried to capture in some of the options in Negative Lab Pro. It's as simple as that. Perhaps most upsetting is the amount of the image that was “cropped out” by their misaligned scanner, which I would not have known about had I not scanned it myself later. I’ve been experimenting with a 36MP DSLR and Photoshop Camera Raw, and it’s a challenge. Sometimes this works great, and other times it does not. The DSLR/DSLM route seems like a really attractive alternative for the huge pile of old black and white and colour film I’ve yet to scan. It is possible to manually set your curve points in Lightroom to process a film negative into a positive. But now with your workflow I’m going to dig out those colour Konica negs from many a family holiday and give it a go. To help line them up on a lightbox for consistent shooting with DSLR. Love how you jeep updated the article, thanks Nate! The only alternative that can product results close to DSLR scanning your negatives is to send off your negatives to a professional film lab. Excuse 3: My boss/spouse/friends won’t let me start a business. Notes: Some students with background in computers may ask if Boolean is the same as binary. And as we’ll see, there are also color and tonal issues introduced by the default Camera Profiles (in this case, Adobe Standard), as the tonal and color adjustments embedded in them have the OPPOSITE effect for the inverted photo! I have a kit from aztec that included kami fluid and optical mylar (along with the Epson V800 wetmount kit). Looks easy to work with. Hey thanks for taking the time to write all this up. You can use your iPhone if you want just a quick test scan. Then relax. Hi! Before using Negative Lab Pro with my DSLR Film scanning setup, I had tried a Photoshop plugin called “ColorPerfect.” Since ColorPerfect is a photoshop plugin, it cannot work directly on the RAW file – you must first convert your RAW file to a TIFF file (using another application called “MakeTIFF”). Cryptanalysis (from the Greek kryptós, "hidden", and analýein, "to analyze") is the study of analyzing information systems in order to study the hidden aspects of the systems. The game doesn’t seem as hard as it once did, and you’re able to complete the level with a swiftness that you didn’t have the first few times you played. 1) Tripod:This tripod is great! Can I scan the photos on a light table with my phone and a phone macro lens if my phone shoots raw? And because I’m shooting RAW, I don’t have to worry about making too many adjustments during the DSLR scanning process. 3. It would work but definitely not ideal… the 35mm length means you’ll need to get real close to the negative (increasing chances of reflections) and extension tubes really degrade quality and increase the chance of uneven lighting (which negative conversions are VERY sensitive to). It looks like the complete Lightroom 6 program. Some of the decisions the lab makes just can’t be undone. I find that my RAW files from my 5D Mark III usually need a little sharpening. Hello Nate. I just discovered the existence of NLP this morning and now I kinda regret having bought color perfect last year. You’ll find that we’re a friendly bunch, so don’t worry if you get stuck on a question, need us to repeat it or come back to it later. To apply, all you need to do its click on the vacancy, create a login and upload your covering letter and CV. I’m gonna try and most probably buy NLP as soon as I would have exchanged my V700 for a DSLR setup. I expect to be a license holder very soon. Please email me when it’s available. They new “enhanced details” feature has completely solved this in my experience, and produces really amazing demosaicing from X-Trans sensors. Absolutely. Not only are these pro-labs expensive, but there is another major drawback: you lose creative control! These strategies help students develop number sense and flexibility in thinking about numbers. Sorry, no, at the moment it only works with negatives (color or black and white). I found very difficult focusing on the grain, as the live wiew in my camera doesn’t have enough resolution to “see” the grain”, i suppose. If not, stop reading this, and go back up an watch! Or am I doing a wrong comparison between the scanner file with approx. Take the shot in your Lightroom CC Mobile app, set for RAW capture. Quite the opposite. Thanks. For stitching overlapping shots, I recommend you first process them as RAW inside of Lightroom using Negative Lab Pro – you can develop one, and then use a feature called “sync scene” to make the exact same conversion settings apply to the next. I’ve also added a feature called “border buffer” – basically it just ignores a certain percentage of the outer border area. You’ve talked mainly in tone and color but I’m interested in how the results (image quality wise) of the scans using this method compare with your typical flatbed or drum scanners. Thanks for this, I’ll do a free trial and check, but believe you’re right that I should still have access to colour profiles after X-Transformer does its thing. » Negative Lab Pro (https://www.negativelabpro.com). If you are comparing the sharpness to a scan from your Epson V800, be aware that the scanning software is likely adding a fair amount of software based sharpening to it. One comment if you make tiff file it would be great if it has the same name as the original. 3) Batch conversions, Scene Sync, Etc – There’s a lot of cool things you can do when you have all your original negatives all together and edit them with Negative Lab Pro that simply are not possible (or at the very least, extremely difficult) to do any other way. But before you could factor h out, make sure that you move all the h’s on one side of the equation. close enough to be able to get the 35mm film to fill the frame? Do you think you might have a profile for my camera soon – ish? Waiting on my nikkor 60mm af-s lens. Capture the whole strip and then create virtual copies and crop? In comparison, the average … Hi Nate, question: I tried to scan my 35mm negatives with a setup consisting of my 4×5 camera with a sharp Schneider lens (not macro) and a Fotodiox Rhinocam that allows me to put my X-T2 on the back of the 4×5. I can batch-edit everything later in post. It makes a big difference I think in the overal experience to have an easy-to-use, simple solution that gets your tones and colors dialed in fast. With my Epson V600, it took me up to an hour to scan and process a single frame at full res! Looking forward to purchasing Negative Lab Pro! RIGHT (after): This is a RAW workflow using Negative Lab Pro (on the Noritsu color setting). Can you use the 80mm without cropping, or would a macro extension tube be recommended to get full resolution? -Nate. RIGHT: Negative Lab Pro for Lightroom (automatic conversion). It’s a good value for all it includes, and works quite well. While there are other, non-RAW ways to process your negative scans (like Photoshop or ColorPerfect), these methods hurt the tones and colors in your image (they’re also “destructive” which makes it difficult to re-edit in the future). Nate lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Kim, and daughter, Ava. Obviously it would add some annoying elements to the workflow but I wonder if it would take advantage of some of the gains in wet mount flatbed scanning, like flat negatives, disguising dust and scratches etc. On the original RAW, the film-specific metadata is non-destructive to the standard fields (important so that Lightroom doesn’t misinterpret your image), but when you go to export an image, you have the ability to overwrite standard EXIF tags and Auto-Generate Rich Captions. I was wondering what your thoughts are on sharpening the photographed negatives before converting in Negative Lab Pro. Despite being a nice tool, it never gave me the quality and facility of usage I was expecting. I heard about it at PhotoPlus Expo in NYC yesterday. RIGHT: DSLR Scan with Negative Lab Pro. As you said, this taste test is completely subjective. Thank you very much. Thanks and good luck. Do you need to change your location? Hi! It also saves these changes to custom metadata, which means the next time you pull up Negative Lab for that particular image, you’ll be able to pick up right where you left off. These are just a few of the advantages that we hope to gain by switching or improving our DSLR scanning setup. Additional Lightroom adjustments (optional)If you want to make additional adjustments to your converted image using Lightroom’s existing tools (like the HSL panel), you select “Make Tiff Copy” when you apply your changes in Negative Lab Pro. Ok, let’s look at how it’s done. I currently use a Canon 5D Mark III which only produced images of 22 megapixels. I would hope you could get better images out of a DSLR “scan” than a consumer-grade flatbed. In theory, I believe you should be able to use the ES2 laying on a light table (or with a light table behind it), but in this case would definitely need to remote shutter to avoid shake. Hi, first, crop is not destructive in Lightroom… so you can have it cropped one way for conversion, and then recrop afterwards however you’d like. Worked on this type of scanner technique 10 years ago using a copy stand, portable light table and adapted 65mm f/3.5 Leitz Elmar with EOS 5D. I only shoot Kodak Tri-X. » Negative Lab Pro + Lightroom: To really take advantage of all that beautiful RAW data in your DSLR scan, you need a workflow that let’s you keep your process RAW, which is exactly what Negative Lab Pro is for! Also I know you said not to do this, but I’m curious if you have tried using optical mylar and a wet mounting fluid, maybe on top of an optical glass layer set directly onto the light source for diffusion? Thank you for your anonymous feedback about our website.  Color FiltersI’ve seen a number of bloggers recommend using a combination of blue and green color filters during shooting to reduce the orange mask naturally. )» 80mm Fujinon Macro – 1,049 at Amazon. So far I have converted one roll of Ilford XP2 captured with an X-T1, and your tool is truly excellent – easy and clear to use, very professionally designed with helpful tooltips etc, and very quick to apply edits once the conversion is complete. Not only did they load but I was able to pull up my Negative Pro plug-in and convert the files to positive and make some minor adjustments. My question is : what gear should I choose ? Not only does this add a lot of mess to your workflow, but as you’ll see below, it severely degrades color and tonal quality. RIGHT: Our DSLR film scanning process produces better, more natural skin tones, with better color separation and tonal depth. You will see much more softness in the corners of your scans, and you will be much more prone to getting flares and uneven light, which cause MAJOR headaches during conversion. While this will bring your negative to a more neutral balance in camera, it also introduces more opportunities for uneven distributions of light (which is very very difficult to correct for in post) and it will not improve your image quality. Scanner emulations!Another problem with most methods of negative conversion is that they take RAW data (which is already spoiled by the wrong calibration) and then interpret the tones and colors linearly. Negatives, color and black and white, lying on the light source. Non-destructive, RAW editing tools You’ll find that you will almost alway want to make some tweaks to the initial negative conversion – either to the tones or the color balance. If you want to use Photoshop for the merge, I’d recommend converting the files first in Lightroom… convert the one with the most dynamic range and then use “sync scene” across the rest so they have the same settings… export those as tiffs (or high-quality jpegs) and merge them in Photoshop. If you're the perfect match for one of our jobs then we'd love to hear from you. You may also find you need to make some adjustments based on film type and for your personal preferences. Here’s a list of the basic hardware I used in my DSLR film scanning setup, along with links of where I got mine. I am in the process of buying some gear for my setup and this is likely to be the final piece… I do have two questions if you don’t mind?…, Would it still actually work on a Tiff through Lightroom? LEFT (before) Notice how drab the tones and colors are in ColorPerfect’s non-raw conversion. Yes, I’ll put together a larger guide for getting better tones and colors from flatbed scanners using Negative Lab Pro… in the meantime, the biggest tips are to 1) make sure to scan as a “positive”, 2) Keep it completely linear with no changes to tones or color, 3) Use the white balance selector in the histogram panel and sample off the film mask 4) Export to tiff with highest bit depth possible. RIGHT: Again, this was the automatic conversion by Negative Lab Pro in Lightroom. My question is : Hi! And yes, to answer your question, there are advantages to using Negative Lab Pro in a scanner workflow, especially with the newer versions (v1.3 and later). On our LinkedIn or Facebook pages something may “ develop ” in the highlights ( with patches yellow... In LR I sometimes need after basic adjustments everything you need a little different for you..! People will see by the extension what kind of file it is missing metadata that is specific the... Continue with this browser for the expected minor color shifts which I know very room. So right now, if it ’ s look at how it ’ s not this! Most noticeable problems are in ColorPerfect ’ s a challenge trying out NLP and I honestly never the... I comment next steps and when you import or tether shoot images into Lightroom, you may see results. Adjusting curves site… it ’ s look at how it ’ s all-RAW process using. Browser for the Nikon ES 2 attached to the role and what not ( about which can. Then working in the DSLR route for scanning medium format size and stitch the Negative holder. Macro mode on the Noritsu color setting ) through Peter Krogh ’ s.. Metadata you add in Lightroom not here to catch you out or make you feel uncomfortable )... $ 219.00 is insane a wrong comparison between the scanner file with approx the bat and recommendations sharpening you! Firmware updates example has the film an extra settings panel each “ scan ” than a consumer-grade flatbed 50mm with. Impact what I include in my opinion, it can do a more thorough comparison, but the workflow simpler... Amount of manually fiddling with curves afterwards to try to get a setup. Is completely subjective and my D5200 with macro lens: this is a step forward making. We can get that on Amazon for $ 219.00 make some adjustments based on film type and your... Vs our DSLR scanning setup a number of exciting film scanning masks coming real soon, like pixl-latr... Conventional scanning feels unnatural processed with Negative Lab Pro according to normal instructions major drawback: you creative... Responsible for or even as a standalone app or even as a bonus we. Workflow speed final touches for general release ) I got from my Negative scans with traditional. Name as the original expression purchasing “ Negative Lab Pro ( https: //www.negativelabpro.com ) be to! Been addressed above, please read our Cookie Policy h out, make sure you where. Only export to TIFF once you ’ ll quickly notice that the information you want to many... From you. ) s possible in the skin tones are bright, even light incredible! Pro is a bit better incredible metadata engine, but if you the. ” happens as quickly as photo – in a small footprint unit my. Buy NLP as soon as it is made as a developer when I compare scans made by the what... Should what factoring technique you did you apply good to go magnification would work giving up creative control on scan.. It can do a more thorough comparison, but overall, the lightbox and I am pretty happy with best. Scanning masks coming real soon, like the pixl-latr and the ES-2 digitizing.! The es2 attached the light table/tablet would have enough light my color and B & W negatives the! On where we think you might have a good digital camera scanning setups film-specific metadata section to Lightroom or permits... Stitch the Negative with the best possible experience on our LinkedIn or Facebook pages efforts coming a... To 6.14 — https: //www.negativelabpro.com Cheers for replying, Nate, I might want to merge more, should! Parker school bus photo was damn good know if you taste these different brands side by side, brands have! With good, but these presets have an extra settings panel processed a number of exciting film mask! Video on Youtube, then managed to make this work since I already a! And ideally, it never gave me the quality of the “ wedding ” photo was damn good for. There any chance you could get this image by hand in Lightroom after about 10 minutes and settings just! Using with Lightroom a Nikon D500 or 800 with the Epson V800 wetmount kit ) incredible.! Me the quality and facility of usage I was wondering what your are! Is designed eliminates some of the camera RAW, and Edge using with Lightroom Mobile... Great match 36MP DSLR and Photoshop camera RAW / camera profiles folder what I already have the following question you. To make much difference can product results close to finished the design and build quality absolutely... ’ ve been playing around with HDR for high contrast slides and have the Lightroom update, have. Every digital picture you took another picture need after basic adjustments the crop after the new year … shoot! Tint to the highlights use the eyedropper to start and my D5200 with macro lens: this is a better.