An alternative to Negative Lab Pro and Lr has to exist (C-41 reversal and orange mask removal)?!

mohmad khatab said:

I strongly support the latter idea.
Kickstarter is the perfect solution.

The programmer is in itself a big problem, as he overestimates his efforts and their value.

Click to expand...

Since it is so trivial, why not do it yourself and take the prize?

mohmad khatab said:

God bless you
- DEB package not found
Do you know how to find it
How can I install it on (debian.OS)

Click to expand...

I got it here, installed it and it worked: https://www.faststone.org/

BradS said:

Since it is so trivial, why not do it yourself and take the prize?

Click to expand...

I think you misunderstood Mohmed. He never said it's easy, just that it's not going to get $10M in 5 years, but will rather get a couple hundred a month.
Yes, it's risky, but so is any business one does oneself. That's why so many of us work for The Man. (a big company)

Smaug01 said:

I think you misunderstood Mohmed. He never said it's easy, just that it's not going to get $10M in 5 years, but will rather get a couple hundred a month.
Yes, it's risky, but so is any business one does oneself. That's why so many of us work for The Man. (a big company)

Click to expand...

No. I don't think so. mohamed quite literally said,

mohmad khatab said:

The programmer is ... a big problem, as he overestimates his efforts and their value.

Click to expand...

What my quick reply was trying to say is that he, mohamed, cannot possibly fathom how much effort is involved and what the value of such is without having tried to accomplish the same and without having some realistic knowledge of the upfront and ongoing costs involved. Devaluing the the programmer even before anything has been offered for sale is...well, distasteful to say the very least.


EDIT: ...and where did those numbers come from? Seems like mohamed just pulled some numbers out of the blue and used them to abuse the developer.

mohmad khatab said:

God bless you
- DEB package not found
Do you know how to find it
How can I install it on (debian.OS)

Click to expand...

Sorry, FastStone is Windows only. There is no version compatible with Linux (or Mac).

You're reading too much into things, Brad.

Saying that a person overestimates his efforts and their value doesn't mean that the efforts are low. It just means he overestimates it. No need to employ hyperbole and get all confrontational.

For example, what if Adrian, who seems to have some skill in programming and a good understanding of photography, makes a go of it. He considers it a lot of effort, as it might take several weeks' worth of full-time programming to get it done. He's also probably thinking in terms of how long that will take if he takes into account his day job. Weeks turns into months. To do this, he wants a pretty good feeling that it will succeed and make him enough money to compensate him for lost evenings and weekends. He makes an educated guess as to how much he could make vs. how much his time is worth. So far, he doesn't feel like the equation balances in his favor. He knows more about that than most of us here do. (both in terms of his required programming effort and what his time is worth)

Others questioned that here. We think maybe he under-estimates how successful it will be. Several of us now have said that we'd be willing to pay for a stand-alone solution, and an imperfect one, at that. (in terms of perfect color correction, since it varies)

Mohmed (to me) was suggesting that someone who would take this on, (maybe a big company) would want a BIG return on their investment. As a one man operation, maybe Adrian wouldn't demand so much.

Well, that’s simply not what he said and, taken at face value, his remark is abusive.

For what it’s worth, I think it won’t be too long before Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Sony or Apple add the feature to their digital cameras and the whole thing is a non-issue.

BradS said:

Since it is so trivial, why not do it yourself and take the prize?

Click to expand...

It is not worthy to distort my words ,,
I did not mean that it is trivial work and does not deserve the material, moral and moral appreciation ,, I did not mean that at all ,, but I mean that the programmer will not agree to receive his wages once at the beginning of the matter ,,
- If we assume now that there is a billionaire person following this discussion, and this person is someone who loves to do good, and decides that he will purchase this application from the programmer in return for the fee determined by the author (the programmer), then he will give this application for free Every planet has Earth and other friendly planets with which we have fraternal and fusion relationships.
What would the programmer react to this offer?
Mostly he will refuse, because he wants to continue to benefit from this application throughout his life, he wants the application to become like a chicken that lays a golden egg to him every morning, he will never be allowed to sell that chicken.
The programmer wants to offer the application for rent, not for sale.
This is what I wanted to say.
- As an analog image community, we can support this innovative programmer,
- If the programmer launches a fundraising campaign on the Kickstarter website, all members of the analog community will support that campaign, and the programmer will obtain his material rights within a few weeks.
- But as I told you, this is almost impossible, the programmer will refuse to go to Kickstarter because he does not want to sell the dish, it only offers the app for rent.
- I hope my words are wrong and I hope that my point of view is incorrect.

Yes, you are wrong. There are still many software developers around that would prefer making a million now instead of making 100.000 per year for the next 10 years.

Yup. Software engineers are a dime a dozen around here. if you feel like the price is too high, then perhaps there is an opportunity for you to create the product, satisfy the market demand and make a handsome profit. Don’t have the knowledge, skills or time? Hire somebody.

I’d do it for a one time fee of $1 million but there’s be absolutely no user support for that. Just software. Nothing else. No way would I put up with this kinda abuse from users - not even for $100k per year.

Best wishes and good luck.

mohmad khatab said:

It is not worthy to distort my words ,,
I did not mean that it is trivial work and does not deserve the material, moral and moral appreciation ,, I did not mean that at all ,, but I mean that the programmer will not agree to receive his wages once at the beginning of the matter ,,
- If we assume now that there is a billionaire person following this discussion, and this person is someone who loves to do good, and decides that he will purchase this application from the programmer in return for the fee determined by the author (the programmer), then he will give this application for free Every planet has Earth and other friendly planets with which we have fraternal and fusion relationships.
What would the programmer react to this offer?
Mostly he will refuse, because he wants to continue to benefit from this application throughout his life, he wants the application to become like a chicken that lays a golden egg to him every morning, he will never be allowed to sell that chicken.
The programmer wants to offer the application for rent, not for sale.
This is what I wanted to say.
- As an analog image community, we can support this innovative programmer,
- If the programmer launches a fundraising campaign on the Kickstarter website, all members of the analog community will support that campaign, and the programmer will obtain his material rights within a few weeks.
- But as I told you, this is almost impossible, the programmer will refuse to go to Kickstarter because he does not want to sell the dish, it only offers the app for rent.
- I hope my words are wrong and I hope that my point of view is incorrect.

Click to expand...

this right here is why I did not respond to your PM to me.

nothing is currently for sale or for rent, or really anything you have said in this post. I’ve described things that I’ve thought of and are considering as potential avenues of execution. The software in question is actually currently more valuable to me as a tool to use in my day to day lab operations, as it allows me to control what hardware it supports, and the environment in which it operates while providing good customer service.

Making it available to others means exponentially more work because people are going to expect it to work with their own equipment/setup. Just making a stand-alone application with a GUI that runs on windows and OSX is not a trivial affair, and we haven’t even gotten to getting all the third party code that my code relies on to work across different platforms.

I seriously doubt the majority of people who would want such a tool even understand just how much effort that is. You can’t accurately assign monetary value to something you don’t really understand, and it would appear that a whole lotta people don’t understand, else there would be no need for this.

Adrian Bacon said:

this right here is why I did not respond to your PM to me.

nothing is currently for sale or for rent, or really anything you have said in this post. I’ve described things that I’ve thought of and are considering as potential avenues of execution. The software in question is actually currently more valuable to me as a tool to use in my day to day lab operations, as it allows me to control what hardware it supports, and the environment in which it operates while providing good customer service.

Making it available to others means exponentially more work because people are going to expect it to work with their own equipment/setup. Just making a stand-alone application with a GUI that runs on windows and OSX is not a trivial affair, and we haven’t even gotten to getting all the third party code that my code relies on to work across different platforms.

I seriously doubt the majority of people who would want such a tool even understand just how much effort that is. You can’t accurately assign monetary value to something you don’t really understand, and it would appear that a whole lotta people don’t understand, else there would be no need for this.

Click to expand...

My friend ,,
You are the only one who can accurately estimate the effort involved,
You have the full right to set the amount you deem appropriate.
No one will dispute you for the amount you want ,,
- You can open an account with Kickstarter ,,, and ask for the amount you want ,, and I am completely confident that you will get what you want completely and perhaps more ..
I hope you are an optimistic person. I feel that you always tend to be pessimistic .. Why?

Adrian Bacon said:

The fact that people on this thread are actively probing what NLP does under the covers and how it works in an effort to reproduce what it does outside of NLP says a lot. I don't support or condone that behavior as it has the potential to directly impact the income possibilities for the author. If he's putting the time and effort in, he should be compensated. I predict it will only be a matter of time before somebody reverse engineers it enough to get over 75% of the way there and posts it online somewhere. .../... In the case of Negative Lab Pro, it's only useful if you already have a paid copy of Adobe's software as it only works in that framework, so the risk is relatively low.

Click to expand...

well, reverse engineering is a common practice. First guy who made a toaster, others disassembled it to see how it worked and made their owns.

Negative Lap Pro does required in fact 2 layers of previous licencing, legally-wise. Windows or Mac as OS, and Adobe for Ligthroom. Technically-wise, no, Windows 7/8/10 and Adobe CC network license validations are cracked since ever.

I am a native unix user (my 1st OS was FreeBSD back in the 90's...) and always saw Windows as a bloated toy where you can do nothing, yet like everyone else I had to use sometimes, at work or in order to help family and friends, or test out some software. My scanners come with manufacturer software that runs only on Win or Mac, so if I need to check EpsonScan for instance I have to fire a Win, which nowadays is done easily as guest OS on VirtualBox instance on Linux with passthrough USD 2.0 support. Not going to pay MS a license for something I don't use, excepted once in a very while for accessing some hardware. Hopefully Hamrick does write their Vuescan in a cross-platform toolkit running on Win, Mac and Linux. I bought a Vuescan Pro license but if I need EpsonScan for lower level maintenance I have to go Win, and similarly for some printers finer maintenance.

I have been testing extensively ColorPerfect and Negative Lab Pro this winter, so by running the trials versions on "worked around" Adobe stuff on "worked around" Win10 inside Virtualbox.
I guess I am going to buy a NLP license, but then I don't want to pull for that an Adobe subscription and a Win license. The authors of ColorPerfect and NLP totally deserve money for their great job, put I don't need the underlying OS. Philosophically it's tricky, because in fact these softwares are just scripts sets of Photoshop and Lightroom functions respectively, you don't buy a software in its own. But then the authors make the user dependent of a totalitarian ecosystem. I am willing to give them money, but not to feed MS and Adobe cash cows.
Adobe made very good things in the past, and in fact first on unix, in the golden days of IRIX and Solaris, but these days are long gone. There have been always calls from Linux users for a Linux version of PS, so there's a market.

Adobe subscription is basically a scam, a tied selling of a software + cloud, you can't pay just for the software. And moreover, ethically-wise, which is not equal with legally-wise, what kind of market freedom is that when there's a monopoly and no choice? There's Aftershop from Corel, natively built for Linux, but Corel isn't anymore since very long a name like Adobe.

In my case, my code is a compiled stand alone application that can be copied and works just fine pretty much anywhere it's copied to as long it's been copied to an operating system that is compatible. Could I invest in putting controls in to prevent copying? Sure, but given the potential market size, is it worth that effort? Or is there a simpler way to do it? Back in the bad old days, software piracy was rampant. With the advent of the internet, companies have pretty much made it a requirement to "call home" so that they can apply DRM if need be. Again, this is something that I could implement, but it boils down to if it's worth that effort for the potential market size.

Click to expand...

about plain piracy, ie. disassembly with purpose of removing a licensing lock, that was done with previous versions of Negative Lab Pro (v1.2.1 and v2.0). Nathan Jonhson authenticator scheme was weak it seems, and easily worked around by decompilation and patching, he must have been aware and last version uses a home call. This also could be worked around I guess but skilled crackers don't spend time on smaller niche stuff, they spend time on mainstream stuff like Win, Office, Adobe.
So if you publish a software as usuful as NLP, put working locks on it, because just embedded key algorithm validation WILL be cracked by kiddies.

The other thing I have to take into consideration is my code makes really heavy use of other free/open source code bases, so I have to be somewhat careful about charging and/or bundling/distributing code together for sale.

Click to expand...

GPL and similar isn't a problem: it just requires mention of them, you give credit. Most commercial software make use of some or other opensource utility anyway. NLP for instance ships with binaries of LittleCMS jpegicc which is MIT license and ImageMagick convert which is its own opensource license flavour.

antonio_b said:

GPL and similar isn't a problem: it just requires mention of them, you give credit. Most commercial software make use of some or other opensource utility anyway. NLP for instance ships with binaries of LittleCMS jpegicc which is MIT license and ImageMagick convert which is its own opensource license flavour.

Click to expand...

Open source licensing very much is a thorny issue if you don't understand it. GPL can absolutely be a problem for anyone who wants to distribute a closed-source commercial product. Most other open source licenses (LGPL, BSD, Apache, MIT, etc.) are not, as long as you're aware of their conditions.

I personally have two issues with NLP. First, as a non-DSLR-scanner user, it fits my workflow very poorly. If it came with a standalone utility that could preprocess my scanner TIFFs into DSLR-like DNG files, I'd be far more willing to use it. (This is why I'm somewhat tempted to figure out what its "Tiff Scan Prep" feature does, so that I can do that to my data BEFORE importing it into Lightroom. Second, it lacks any film-specific profiles of any sort.
Meanwhile, ColorPerfect, Silverfast, and this other unreleased tool we keep hearing about, all use film-specific profiles to do their thing.

And FWIW, the main reason I'm even bothering with any of these tools right now is that 3rd party scanner software (i.e. Silverfast, Vuescan, etc) feels like a very clunky and poor fit with running my Nikon scanner. (Meanwhile, Nikon Scan works great, but the out-of-the-box colors on negative scans aren't always so great.)

Like Adrian noted, I"m amazed this thread is still going. Were I him, I'd resist getting into the software biz when he's already in one demanding tough business. How many can a man stand? Dunno. Good luck if you do, and nothing against NOT doing it either. Fact is - as someone who's seen this in other hobbies - there is always a clamor for something that's not out there, but the minute it is, then folks will begin to quibble endlessly about features, price, etc. and only about 1 in 10 will actually order anything. Ask the model railroad folks. I know those guys and it's a notorious phenomenon.

I searched for Color Perfect software here and came up empty. Anyone using this? NLP isn't the only game in town.... but it looks to have been dismissed. Did I miss something? They seem to be doing much the same that NLP does. I have NLP and it's fine. Not rocket science for B&W at least (haven't tried it with color). Just curious.

JWMster said:

I searched for Color Perfect software here and came up empty. Anyone using this? NLP isn't the only game in town.... but it looks to have been dismissed. Did I miss something?

Click to expand...

I have mentioned it numerous times in this very thread, as well as others.

JWMster said:

..... (NLP) looks to have been dismissed. Did I miss something? ....

Click to expand...

My impression is that this thread isn't so much about NLP as it is about not wanting to pay for software (NLP, Adobe LightRoom, etc..).

It seems like most, if not all, who've actually used NLP report that it does a good job.

GLS: My apologies. Searching the thread turned up nothing in the above search box. Maybe I misspelled it?

JWMster said:

GLS: My apologies. Searching the thread turned up nothing in the above search box. Maybe I misspelled it?

Click to expand...

No problem. Search for "ColorPerfect" in this thread, or the site generally, and you will see many results.

BradS said:

My impression is that this thread isn't so much about NLP as it is about not wanting to pay for software (NLP, Adobe LightRoom, etc..).

It seems like most, if not all, who've actually used NLP report that it does a good job.

Click to expand...

It's not about not wanting to pay for software, it's about refusal to subscribe to software. (i.e. to never be DONE paying)

Using NLP requires a subscription to Adobe software, rather than a one-time purchase. One has to be pretty dedicated to shooting color film to do that. For occasional color film shooting, it might be better to just shoot slide film. --> High cost per roll, but very little messing around with colors, once processed.

For my part, I'll just shoot digital in the meantime, and convert my occasional old negatives manually and laboriously.

Smaug01 said:

It's not about not wanting to pay for software, it's about refusal to subscribe to software. (i.e. to never be DONE paying)

Click to expand...

I realize what I’m about to say is probably going to be very unpopular, but I just have to say it because it is true: the whole pay once and never have to pay again is a total and complete fallacy.

The fact of the matter is software changes over time. Your computer dies, you get a new computer with a new OS and guess what? Your old software eventually will stop working on the newer operating systems. It may not happen in one upgrade cycle, but it will in fact happen at some point. This is a fact of life. Expecting a software company to support running on every new operating system to come out for the rest of your life because you paid your $99 (or whatever it was) is not only unrealistic, but not sustainable, and will lead to said company to either go out of business or eventually stop supporting that code base because they can’t keep paying developers to spend time on it with no money coming in to pay for it. When that happens, guess what? You then have to find a replacement, and..... pay for it.

Only want to use free and/or open source software? OK. You get what you pay for though. There are very few free/open source software packages that are actually well maintained over the long run without some corporation funding developer time spent on it, and the only reason why is because they are making money from it. You also pay in terms of time spent getting it to work for you and/or in not having features that you want, and/or finding a replacement when the project loses its funding and goes dormant, which happens all the time. Just look at the millions of free/open source projects in the last decade alone that are effectively dead code.

Specifically in regards to Adobe’s creative suite, people seem to have forgotten how much it used to cost when you could just buy it outright. Oh, and by the way, Adobe didn’t support making that version work forever, because they couldn’t without going out of business. So then 3-4 years goes by, your computer dies, you get a new one, and guess what? Your version of photoshop doesn’t work any more because Microsoft changed the underlying OS interface that Photoshop was using. Now because Adobe only supported making that version of Photoshop work until they released the next version of Photoshop (plus maybe one OS upgrade cycle), if you want photoshop, you now have to buy it again, at the ginormous “one time” purchase price, except it’s not “one time” because here you are buying it again. If you actually do the math, the subscription over time is actually less expensive than the old model, and you have the added benefit of time saved because you always have the latest version and therefore aren’t spending time dinking around trying to get an old version to work on a newer OS.

The long and the short of it is, you are never done paying. You can either pay small amounts at regular intervals, or you can pay much larger amounts at longer intervals, but either way, you still pay in one form or another.

Adrian Bacon said:

Specifically in regards to Adobe’s creative suite, people seem to have forgotten how much it used to cost when you could just buy it outright.

Click to expand...

I hate to say it, but Photoshop fits in its own special pricing category. Its the category where a vendor makes something so obscenely expensive that a huge portion of its userbase would rather simply pirate it than pay for a legitimate copy.

Lightroom, on the other hand, was actually sold for a reasonable price. It was a price I honestly didn't mind paying, nor did I mind paying a bit more for the version upgrades they released every once in a while. For the longest time, this was actually the only Adobe product I could justify using.

Now that they have this new subscription model, as unpopular as it may be, it actually seems to make the overall pricing far more palatable. For once, I finally have an actual Photoshop license in addition to Lightroom, which means I don't have to bend over backwards to avoid using Photoshop anymore.

(That being said, I still personally prefer to buy something once, even if I have to occasionally pay for major version upgrades, than to have a monthly recurring charge.)

dkonigs said:

I hate to say it, but Photoshop fits in its own special pricing category. Its the category where a vendor makes something so obscenely expensive that a huge portion of its userbase would rather simply pirate it than pay for a legitimate copy.

Lightroom, on the other hand, was actually sold for a reasonable price. It was a price I honestly didn't mind paying, nor did I mind paying a bit more for the version upgrades they released every once in a while. For the longest time, this was actually the only Adobe product I could justify using.

Now that they have this new subscription model, as unpopular as it may be, it actually seems to make the overall pricing far more palatable. For once, I finally have an actual Photoshop license in addition to Lightroom, which means I don't have to bend over backwards to avoid using Photoshop anymore.

(That being said, I still personally prefer to buy something once, even if I have to occasionally pay for major version upgrades, than to have a monthly recurring charge.)

Click to expand...

That's a preference though... You're still paying over time. And the new subscription model isn't actually unpopular.... If anything it has increased the size of their user base by several fold because it's less expensive both up front, and over time, so more people can afford to just get the LR/PS subscription bundle.

Whilst I'm definitely not a fan of the subscription model for software, at the same time I recognise that paying 10 quid a month for PS + Lightroom really isn't that big a deal. At those rates you are getting 5-6 years of use for the same one-off price it would have cost you to outright buy PS and LR separately.

Either way, some people in this thread may want to revise their definitions of expensive. An example: at work I recently asked for a quote to purchase a license for MOE (Molecular Operating Environment), which is the industry standard software for (among other things) molecular modeling and drug design. The price for a one year license for one user? $58,000. Now that is obscene.