Converting Color Negatives...Negative Lab Pro vs Filmomat Smart Convert

[Robert Ley]

After 50+ years in analog photography, I have embarked on a monumental (for me) project of digitizing a good portion of my negatives and slides. I have a Bowens Illumitran that works really well for 35mm and I am presently copying my slide collection that is surprisingly larger than I thought. I am using my Nikon D600 to capture both slides and negative. My negative setup is the D600 with 60mm F2.8 and 105mm f:2.8 macro lenses. I am using a Kaiser LED light panel and masking it with black Mat board and using the negative carriers from my Epson 4990. I also use a copy stand, can't empathize that enough.
I have shot and converted about 500 4x5, and 6x7 color and B&W negs with Negative Lab Pro and it has worked pretty well albeit can take some time to convert them and the plethora of adjustment and controls, plus it only works in Lightroom.

My question to you good members is, Has anyone used both and can make a comparison. I have experience with NLP and it really did well on some of my better negatives but it takes a lot of time and probably only 10% of my negs really deserve that treatment and the others are more for archive purposes. If I end up getting the Filmomat software I will continue to use the NLP as well.

I downloaded Filmomat's Demo version and and it converted them very quickly and had some nice feature like auto crop. They also have a mobile app and I got the app for my Iphone about a year ago and was not at all impressed, didn't work well at all. Maybe the fault lies in my use of the app but my experience put me off of the company. Recently I've seen some YouTube videos on film conversion and came across some vids on Smartconvert. It looks like it might do the job, plus the USB handset looks like it might be fun.

So before I invest in more software I'd like the opinion of any members who have used both software's or members who have experience with Smartconvert. Also if anyone has used or has the nifty little USB Control Panel.

Thanks for reading my post and any comments you'd like to make.
Robert

 

[romosoho]

I'm sorry that I haven't used Filmomat or Smartconvert, but I'm surprised NLP is taking long enough for you to comment on it. Is your computer an older one? Mine isn't instantaneous but it's nothing to note.

 

[Steven Lee]

I've used both. NLP default colors (regardless of its settings) always require a lot of editing afterwards. This takes comparable amount of time vs converting manually. A well-done manual conversion is still not matched by any software I've tried, so my best negatives are always inverted manually.

My two criticisms of Smart Convert is that it doesn't support lens profiles (my macro lens has a noticeable distortion) and clips highlights. By the way, NLP also clips highlights at comparable frequency but it offers an offset adjustment.

And by the way, the nicest converter of them all IMO is Negamster. Unfortunately, its Photoshop edition does not appear to be maintained anymore (still doesn't support Apple silicon) and its the only version that works with digital cameras. The "BR" version is for scanners only.

 

[radialMelt]

There's a few threads here on this topic; worth searching for them.

I have used both NLP and SmartConvert quite extensively. My current conversion software of choice is ColorPerfect, which is a Photoshop plugin.

I've used NLP a lot and even purchased the upgrade to the latest version. A couple of things caused me to move on from it:

• the conversions were all over the place, even with all the new "roll analysis" features, etc. Too often it was doing quite extreme corrections or plain weird things to the color. Caveat, I am feeding it raw files from a film scanner, not "camera scanning".
  • and as the previous poster mention, it would often clip and lose data
• I really tired of the workflow. Having to access it's dedicated control panel to make changes, keeping two copies of files (the raws, and the positives)... all of that stuff became a pain in the butt for me.

SmartConvert I wanted to love. I really enjoy the interface, the keyboard shortcuts... the "lab scanner" workflow. I could commit to a conversion and have one file in my library that I would edit further in Lightroom. I went so far as to buy this as well. However, after a while, I realized that SmartConvert was almost always clipping highlights and adding an unnecessary amount of contrast. The deal breaker for me is that there's no way to actually avoid this; there's no histogram of any kind in the app. I emailed the manufacturer asking if they had any plans to add a histogram-- no response.

Enter ColorPerfect. Firstly, it has a terrible UI, and requires that I also run Photoshop. However, the conversions are consistent, and all I ever do with it is run the conversion and make sure I am not clipping anything and losing data. This is what I really like about ColorPerfect-- it tells me exactly how much data is being clipped. I am able to do some minor color tweaks to fix any egregious color casts, then export a nice flat file and bring into Lightroom where I do 95% of the color correction. And I can be confident I didn't lose any data along the way, which, to me, since I want to edit using Lightroom, is the most important part. So in the end I have that one file in my library that has all the data from the scanner and frankly is pretty consistently at a good starting point as far as color inversions go.

My 3c!