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

So I picked up a copy of NegMaster. Negative Lab Pro seems pretty good for most things, but I don't use Lightroom and am not planning on starting. Quick, non thorough review of NegMaster:

Seems to do what it says on the tin, has a nice little palette interface - very polished looking. I think v2.2 is currently in beta (I didn't try the old version) and some of the keyboard commands don't sync up to the right adjustment layers. It looks like most of the processing happens in regular PS layers, which is nice from a learning perspective since you can dissect it. The basic conversion does NOT happen in an adjustment layer. You bring in your RAW file through ACR, white balance on the film rebate, then invert with a preset (just inverts the scan with curves) which applies a special profile, which I suspect is some variation of a linear gamma. Then you open the file in PS, and you run the conversion, which appears to be some sort of auto curves, but probably in the linear gamma color space. The output of that requires some additional on some of the scans I played around with.

I'm glad I purchased it since I learned some new things, but I suspect I'll continue to invert with my homemade actions. The custom profile does help - I'm sure if you were knowledgeable enough, you could do the right steps in a linear gamma color space and then convert.

So, not a bad tool. If you are happy with NLP, probably stick with it, but if you are looking for something more PS centric, it might be worth it.

I did not try it in LR, only ACR. You tag the raw file with a specific profile, white balance on the rebate, and invert it with curves in ACR, then the rest is in PS.

I’m sure it would work with 16bit TIFFs if the file looked right. Depends what the starting point is. If it wasn’t already white balanced on the rebate I think you would have some issues.

FWIW I think the special profile is 95% of the magic, which I think you can make yourself. NPL uses a similar profile, and the first real step in PS appears to be an application of auto curves.

Hi, my name is André. I am the developer of Negmaster.
Plenty of speculations going around here, likely because the website is still unclear in some things. Sorry for that, maintaining two products with development, support, social media (facebook group) eats more time than i have.
If you are having any questions about Negmaster feel free to ask me. Preferably via mail.
To answer the first question: No there are no standard Photoshop curves adjustments during conversion because all automatic curves or tonal adjustments work by trimming the histogram. Negmaster is adjusting per channel gamma, what is harder to calculate. It even shows in diagnosis how many pixels of the frame were trimmed. When gamma is calculated pixels will get brighter and darker and will be pushed outside the histogram, but you can adjust the strength of that.
There is no "linear color space" because linear color spaces don't exist. An image's brightness can be linear but that has nothing to do with the color space it is in.
Negmaster used some own color spaces up to version 2.2.0 because i tried things out. You can adjust the illuminant and white point in a color space. And that i did. This is obsolete with the next release.
Part of the "magic" are truly the camera profiles. It was a lot of work to develop them and they are much different to NLP profiles which are only linear in brightness, based on the standard Adobe camera profiles as far as i know and still negative. The Negmaster profiles already invert the image in Lightroom before it is rendered to Photoshop and are not based on Adobe's standard profiles. The Adobe standard profiles have Lut tables embedded, that make digital positives "pleasing". It's like shifting red to magenta or making green more yellow. You can imagine what will happen, when inverting a color shifted in hue, saturation and brightness. That behaviour is removed from my profiles, as well as twisting hues that happen when changing exposure or white balance.

There are some simple reasons why i don't offer a demo. I want to keep the community small and friendly. In the last year i made the experience, that people who are really interested in Negmaster will buy the full version and i can accompany them in making their scans better. Because that is the key to success.
In 90 percent of all use cases of dslr scanning, the scans are suffering too warm or uneven backlights, under- or overexposure.
Negmaster behaves very rewarding to good scans because it does not induce artificial colors or colors on "absolute" basis. That said, it does not work that well with bad scans. NLP is better optimized for this. But when your scans are good, you will get better results from Negmaster. It's that simple. And it's always better than funny camera profiles and artificial colors added on top of good scans right?
So the "plan" is to help people learning to scan better. And for that they need a trusty basis.
The upcoming version will get some features in that direction like "autowarming" etc...where cyan color casts are automatically compensated. But you can adjust that in 1 step increments from 0-100. Autogamma and what not. But that is all not necessary with good scans. And to be honest again: There is and never will be a program that will satisfy you. Because you are photographers. Creative people with own perceptions, styles and expectations. That's why i don't claim perfect automatic conversions. There is no perfection in taste right? Maybe there is a smallest common denominator. Like "pleasing colors". I only claim to give you a good basis for further forward editing. Because editing backwards is harder. And Negmaster brings the tools for that and doesn't add much contrast or blows the highlights/shadows...
Of course you can push the sliders harder if you like bold images. But personally i like it to have some leeway for editing.
Atm i'm baking presets for digital photography. You know that "looks like film" thing... I gathered 10 Negmaster users for that on Facebook. I don't get that damn thing done because everyone is having his own expectations and perceptions of film colors (me i'm the worst). I mean we're all discussing all the time in groups and chats or forums what is better or the best software for converting film negatives. And in the end it's even really difficult to satisfy ten users with some analog-ish presets. One likes it bold and crushed, another one loves flaws and color casts, three people have different understandings of "neutral"... You get it. I mean, i'm german, what means i'm maybe kind of neurotic. I don't mind if a Porsche has wide tyres. I mind how wide they are. In millimeters. Exactly. But i don't forget that thing was built for fun. And that's how i would ride it. If i could afford it. Whatever...

The "Negsets" are a different story. They are free for Negmaster users and don't need Photoshop to work but if you want you can "push" your images in a certain direction with them and Negmaster does the rest.
Or you use them for editing completely in Lightroom. The product is still very young. Out of the door for two or three weeks now. Will wait another week and ask the users what could be better. So there will be updates on the profiles.

Please keep in mind Negmaster is a one man show. I'm just "one of you" and not a big company or someone who just wants to pull the money out of your pockets. I'm doing this for one year now, almost 24/7 with a lot of passion and engagement. Otherwise that would not have been possible. Many people are buying it just for supporting me or analog photography in general and i'm really really thankful for that because actually NLP owns the target group completely and it's really difficult to get this going without having that much money behind my back. And as you can see i make mistakes like my website confusing people.

I hope i could make some things clear. Wish you all the best!

@Old Gregg thank you. I hope i really do.
I forgot to answer your question regarding tif files.
Negmaster will convert everything Photoshop can open, as well as tif, gamma 1,0, makeTif, .raw files from Pakon Tlx client demo and all that.
For tif files from Vuescan for example it is important that it is already white balanced while scanning.
The biggest difference between raw and tif is, that white balance is "baked in". What will lead to a blue color cast when scanned as is. If you're scanning with Vuescan you could scan it as a resulting dng or tif positive. I always recommend this because it's much more convenient to use. The resulting dng file will have a vuescan profile embedded that is by no means linear. When preparing it in Lightroom you can embed one of Negmaster's profiles and you will have a linear positive then. Not so with Tif. We can't apply a camera profile there because it's already baked in as well as WB is.

I think the best possible solution in terms of quality will always be inverting by hand as long as the root if the conversion (raw profile and treatment) is correctly done. Personally i'm understanding the analog to digital conversion as part of the analog process. It's just exchanging the darkroom where i spent so many hours. And it was fun for me, as well as working with Negmaster. I think this is an important point for some people. Many went from digital to analog to feel a "slow down" in photography. Contact sheets, post processing while enlarging always was as important as the process of composition and preparation. In that way i designed Negmaster. I wanted something that is fun to use with single frames, like it was using an enlarger in the dark room. Nevertheless Negmaster is able to batch process thousands of images... But that's not my personal workflow. I like to take care of single images. I do it like back in the day. Contact sheet via inverted profile in LR -> selection of single images that i feel a high esteem for -> edit -> save as tif or psd
Though you could as well batch tif a whole role and edit then. Your choice. The advantage over inverting by hand is consistency. Negmaster offers many possibilities like batch or syncing your edit to all open documents.
Atm i'm busy with those looks like film profiles. I'm concentrating on Portra at first. After the release - i think in about a week - i will need another week for finishing and polishing the Negmaster update. There is a lot of other work to do then. Like giving support for the new functions (mostly with video tutorials on FB messenger) and writing a new user guide. I'm not that good at "business english" and it always takes me a long time to get this ~kinda right.

Thanks for the compliment for my work.
In the 90ies i was a correspondent for the german marines (Leica M4), after that i worked as a media designer and portrait/business photographer (Hasselblad 500CM, Mamy RB67), mostly for commercials. Html, scripting and programming is part of the job when working as media designer. For quite some time i worked in a foundry, built motorcycles and triode tube amps besides my job and sold them on the internet. Then i got some serious problems with my body because of the job in the foundry and i decided to go back to photography business.
So Negmaster just happened as a consequence of what i know i can do. It's where it all came together. Even the motorcycles and girls ;-) Unfortunately a few years late, but let's see what that is good for in the end.

@Old Gregg well, stories only life can write. ‍
Yeh, hope you'll have fun with it.

@Old Gregg thank you, i already replied to your e-mail.

Andre, do you have any comparison images of a negative being converted via NLP vs. Negmaster? I don't require a demo, but as times are tough and LR is my default editing software, I can't justify a blind buy.

@Mesabound yes i understand that. I find it "difficult" showing direct comparisons. That can never be fair.
But i very much appreciate you interest and i can surely make you an offer you can't resist.
What if you buy it, and if you are not satisfied after one week (with the current beta and support from me), i will refund. Deal?

Andre from Negmaster said:

@Mesabound yes i understand that. I find it "difficult" showing direct comparisons. That can never be fair.
But i very much appreciate you interest and i can surely make you an offer you can't resist.
What if you buy it, and if you are not satisfied after one week (with the current beta and support from me), i will refund. Deal?

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Andre,
To be honest, I was a bit surprised that you don't offer a time-limited trial. Wouldn't be less effort for you if you didn't have to do some amount of refunds? I think that all my software that costs over US $50 allows a trial.

Well i'm doing it like that for some reason. I wrote about that before if you like to read previous comments. Effort was never a problem. It's all about getting a proper community, a starting point and listening closely to what users say.
I see no use in offering a demo now. This will result in users not reading the manual and using it the same way as other programs. That would result in bad marketing. I'm rather relying on a smaller group of satisfied users that do the talking for me because they know what they are talking about.
If you want to know more about how i'm doing things and how Negmaster works feel free to join "Negmaster unisono" next wednesday. That is a video conference on Jitsi open for everyone. It is meant as a friendly exchange "in personal" between users and developer on a weekly basis. I will offer tutorials there and answer any question from the users (if i can and as long the questions are on a base everyone understands. So we'll not get too geeky there). This will be the right place for discussing feature requests as well as asking questions of users not yet owning a license. Coming wednesday we will do this for the first time and i'm really looking forward to it.

Andre from Negmaster said:

@Mesabound yes i understand that. I find it "difficult" showing direct comparisons. That can never be fair.
But i very much appreciate you interest and i can surely make you an offer you can't resist.
What if you buy it, and if you are not satisfied after one week (with the current beta and support from me), i will refund. Deal?

Click to expand...

This *is* a tempting offer and one I may reach out to you to take advantage of. I'll let you know.

Old Gregg said:

@PhilBurton I have both and I easily see why direct comparison makes no sense what-so-ever. Both offer multiple options for inversion. Both try to support two types of workflow:

• "Quick & easy", AKA "lab mode", i.e. similar to what labs give you. And even this mode has multiple options!
  
• "Gentle starter" i.e. a flat look which advanced users will use as a foundation for subsequent tweaking.

I do not like "quick & easy" in both products because they both try to get "fancy" with contrast/saturation and I know I can do much better without automation. And if I'm going that route, I can get 100% identical look with both (basically if I posted samples you'll see the same image, but the method of producing it would be different). That said...

The two biggest differences between them are:

1. UX. The NLP offers higher throughput - you can tweak different white balance settings, scanner LUTs, color balance, very quickly - just click & see the results, click again, etc. Negmaster's approach is slower: it creates Photoshop adjustment layers on to of your image, and if you don't like the results I have to undo and invoke it again. NLP uses Lightroom engine under the hood, while Negmaster uses Photoshop and looks like Lightroom is just faster than Photoshop.
   
2. Conversion envelope. Some images just "don't work" in NLP and I had to revert to manual inversion. Negmaster never fails, looks like it uses a much more robust "engine" under the hood. Another evidence of this is that it doesn't get fooled by a film rebate, compared to NLP which (similar to Silverfast) requires borders to be removed. One film stock where Negmaster routinely crushes NLP is Fuji 400H, probably because its orange mask is so heavy that it exceeds WB adjustment range of Lightroom.

Here's a few Negmaster samples:

• Fuji Superia 400
• Fuji 400H

And here's an image that I have produced two absolutely identical copies with both inverters. I only kept one copy (well, because they were 100% identical), but here it is:

• Fuji 400H

TLDR: Negmaster is slower but seemingly has no limits. Great for medium format, perfect for large format. NLP is much faster, much better suited for larger volumes (35mm) but has a small "defect rate" of frames that you're better inverting manually, or just discarding as failure.

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@Old Gregg.

I can appreciate all your points, but I would like to do my own evals. FYI: Aside from some very small amount of 120 format stuff, all my material, thousands and thousands of negatives, is 35 mm.

I also need to say that my entire career was in software product management, so I think I know a thing or two about pricing models, including free trials. I can appreciate Andre's arguments, I just don't concur with them. (And I would have to go into PMs to explain in more depth.)

Thanks for the post, Gregg. My experience w/ NLP has been very positive overall, but I agree w/ your assessment of the so-called defect rate.

Andre: As a new user of your program finding a few issues getting started... I am very interested in your online "class". However, Wednesday I am on an all day drive. Will you record this for replay? Love to catch it later. THanks!

I am scanning (with a DSLR) some old color negatives from the 1970's on. Initially, I had no program to convert them, so I asked about candidates on a local forum. Negative Lab Pro was recommended, just like here; however, I'm normally on Linux and don't want to spend more money than necessary.

An alternative that looks pretty good to me is negfix8 (https://sites.google.com/site/negfix) It does require you to have ImageMagick, but that shouldn't be a problem. I also use gimp on the output, but that might just be me. I mean, it might be avoided, because negfix8 can take a lot of arguments. But I only understand a few of those. I haven't done this stuff before.

Nelari said:

An alternative that looks pretty good to me is negfix8 (https://sites.google.com/site/negfix) It does require you to have ImageMagick, but that shouldn't be a problem. I also use gimp on the output, but that might just be me. I mean, it might be avoided, because negfix8 can take a lot of arguments. But I only understand a few of those. I haven't done this stuff before.

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Have you tried this software yet? I'm on Linux and couldn't get it to work first time around.

Tom Kershaw said:

Have you tried this software yet? I'm on Linux and couldn't get it to work first time around.

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Yes, I have used it, and am happy with the results. It did work for me, first time around.

Given the option of only having either NLP or NM what criteria can one realistically use if one cannot try both & compare for themselves? Personally, I am not going to shell out $200 on negative conversion software only to find out that I’ll probably never use one of the two after seeing which one suits my needs best. I understand the developers rationale, but by doing it this way you have zero input as to how many potential users you are turning away.

Nelari said:

I am scanning (with a DSLR) some old color negatives from the 1970's on. Initially, I had no program to convert them, so I asked about candidates on a local forum. Negative Lab Pro was recommended, just like here; however, I'm normally on Linux and don't want to spend more money than necessary.

An alternative that looks pretty good to me is negfix8 (https://sites.google.com/site/negfix) It does require you to have ImageMagick, but that shouldn't be a problem. I also use gimp on the output, but that might just be me. I mean, it might be avoided, because negfix8 can take a lot of arguments. But I only understand a few of those. I haven't done this stuff before.

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somewhere earlier in the thread I mentioned that I am a "native" Unix user since the 90's. I have been using SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX and since version 1.0 Linux, since version 2.something FreeBSD, etc. I currently use Linux or FreeBSD or OpenBSD.
Which means I was doing colour inversion with ImageMagick and Gimp. negfix8 is an IM script which works reasonably well when you get the correct parameters for the kind of film.

In fact Gimp provides often an acceptable starting point to be adjusted, when you apply Color > inversion and Levels > auto-levels, or if in batch mode : ' gimp-drawable-invert' and 'gimp-drawable-levels-auto'. From the result you can work the curves, contrast, luminance, ....

so NLP and Linux:
I bought NLP last year I did run it on Linux via WINE emulation. NLP requires Lightroom 6 ie. CC 2015 at least. I tried all LR versions since the 2015 to the current, with different settings for the Windows paramaters and some extra librairies (installable from Winetricks or manually) but only LR6 works. The last release of NLP requires LR 8 in order to use LUT presets.
Back then when I started using NLP in WINE on Linux, I posted a short video on Youtube were I process a batch:


NLP and FreeBSD:
on FreeBSD if you build the last WINE with the correct couple arguments, not the one from ports, you can also run LR6

LR6 is the last with one-time license, so no need to get hooked in the Adobe scam.


But, after some rolls taken this winter, I could see that NLP isn very adequate for a diversity of reasons. And I went to try closer ColorPerfect. It happens to be better, and also, at least for someone used to the Unix ecosystem, clearer, because you manipulate directly color metrics, instead of dealing with post "flavors" that the NLP presets are.
And the beauty of ColorPerfect is that it runs on old Adobe Photoshop 7.0 (!). Photoshop 7.0 runs flawlessly and very sharp on WINE and is so old that it has been floating around with keys everywhere in the last 15 years..

the 100% ethical and reasonably cheap way though is to run ColorPerfect on Photoline (the german graphic editor). Photoline too runs flawlessly under WINE, and almost faster that native Gimp for many manipulations. It's about two one-time licences: one ColoPerfect and one Photoline (both usable on different machines).
There are couple tweaks to do on command line in order to use CP for inversion of DSLR/Mirrorless scans, but that's all.

If I have a bit of time I should create a thread with details and screenshots, for running NLP and Color Perfect on Linux and FreeBSD.

antonio_b said:

If I have a bit of time I should create a thread with details and screenshots, for running NLP and Color Perfect on Linux and FreeBSD.

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Could you make that Photoline and ColorPerfect? These both offer trial versions – NLP apparently doesn't. Also, Photoline is 59€ and ColorPerfect 83€, which I would be prepared to pay. I mean, if the combination turns out to be significantly better than negfix8+ImageMagick.

Nice....Thanks Gregg.

Old Gregg said:

NLP offers a trial version.

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So it does – sorry about that. The reason I didn't look deeply enough into NLP is that it requires LightRoom, and I'm sure I'll never buy LightRoom.

There have been posts here to the effect that, for software, either you pay a little every month (for years and years) or you pay a lot every few years. In either case, you pay. I don't agree with that. It's not like I will need photo software every month and every year, the rest of my life. In fact, I have had periods of photographing obsessively, and periods of not photographing at all. I'm talking about periods of several years here.

I shall most certainly be scanning old color negatives for the next few weeks. But when I run out of good ones, who knows? I might never scan color negatives again.

On this same note, whether I go with NLP, Color Perfect, Negmaster, or Film Lab Desktop I am primarily camera scanning 4x5 B&W negatives. I don’t mind shelling out the $ for the software. I have a big catalog of 35mm to get to next. I did learn the hard way that el cheapo film holders are a waste of money. I finally ponied up for Negative Supply gear. But my question is I want to learn what to do with converted B&W negatives. There’s lots of info on converting color images to B&W using post production software, but not much on working with B&W camera scans. Dumb question, but is an RGB B&W camera scan that has been converted any different than a color negative RGB scan that has been converted to B&W? My guess is no, as a B&W RGB file is a B&W RGB file. So can I teach myself post production using the info that I find on how to process color files into B&W images? I hope I’m explaining my question correctly.

Nelari said:

Could you make that Photoline and ColorPerfect? These both offer trial versions – NLP apparently doesn't. Also, Photoline is 59€ and ColorPerfect 83€, which I would be prepared to pay. I mean, if the combination turns out to be significantly better than negfix8+ImageMagick.

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ok, I'll post with the details in one or two days.

It's very simple, requires very little command line in case you are not comfortable with it but are more a GUI/desktop user.
Have WINE installed on your system, download the Photoline trial and install it with wine, run PL, then install ColorPerfect demo in Photoline as per instructed in the provided readme.

Warning: use of CP is simple but isn't very well explained on its site, no very didactic, better on its youtube channel.

Photoline is very light on the system and takes only ~85mb of disk space. Yet itś very powerful. LR6 takes ~1,9gb ! and most of it is useless for just the inversion.

Right now a capture of my current desktop, there's Photoline in black skin in the background with a loaded negative, the CP windows with the rendered positive, a terminal windows showing processes running: