Filmomat SmartConvert. (Negative conversion software)

[Alan Edward Klein]

This will sound like an advertisement, and it kind of is, but I'm in no way affiliated with the company. I just think good products deserve some recognition.

One of the reasons I stopped shooting digital and went back to film is that I don't like the process of digitally editing photos, and I never had a digital camera that produced jpg's to my liking. Scanning and converting negatives yourself still involves quite a bit of digital post processing, especially color negatives. I've tried Negative Lab Pro, but I don't use Adobe products anymore, so that's off the table. For a while now I've been using Affinity photo, and it works quite well. Still, some color negatives are troublesome and require a lot of work. Out of desperation I did a google search about a week ago, and came across Filmomat SmartConvert. My expectations were low but I downloaded the demo and was pleasantly surprised. The demo lets you try unlimited conversion, but present them in lower resolution, and with a water stamp. The full version lets you export in TIFF and JPG, and has taken every camera raw format I've thrown at it this far. I paid the 99 euros for the full version the same day, and have been very happy this far.

The number of adjustments in the software are quite limited, but it does a really good job out of the box, plus you can point it to a folder and tell it to convert every image that pops into that folder, which is great when you scan or tether your digital camera. You don't even have to include any film base in your scans for setting white balance, although I have no idea how the software manages it.

That's enough from me. Again, not affiliated with Filmomat. But hey, Filmomat! Now you know where to find me, if you should be so inclined.

These came straight out of the software. Some of you may remember the Harley from another thread. The Harley took 5 seconds to convert and has had no adjustments whatsoever done to it. The boat was cropped in SmartConvert and then had the whitebalance automatically recalculated to exclude the cropped out negative holder. The Harley was shot on Portra 800 and the boat on Harman Phoenix 200.


View attachment 377458 View attachment 377459

Can you show us conversions with colors that we could see that would be easily noticed if wrong such as blue skies, flesh tones of people, green grass and green foliage. There's little way to tell if the color in your two pictures are "correct".

 

[cobb]

This is another thing I don't really understand about smart convert. There's this gap in the curve/levels, and maybe it's by design but other software doesn't do this so it's one less step of working the image normally.

 

[radialMelt]

I haven't really liked the results I've gotten from SmartConvert. The tiff files from it don't seem to have the same amount of leeway as files converted using NLP. They also sharpen poorly. I love the way the app works, but I can't use it because of the lower quality output.

I mention this earlier in the thread but I had the same issue. SC output tended to clip the extremes leaving very little headroom for further edits, with no histogram or way of actually seeing things clip before its too late. This is with Vuescan raw DNGs - not camera digitization - by the way.

I have been having the best luck with Vuescan raw inverted with ColorPerfect with no adjustments aside from making sure nothing is clipped, and then into my photo editor of choice (in this case LR) where I do the remainder of my color corrections and edits.

 

[cerber0s]

This is another thing I don't really understand about smart convert. There's this gap in the curve/levels, and maybe it's by design but other software doesn't do this so it's one less step of working the image normally.

What do the corresponding images look like?

 

[cerber0s]

Can you show us conversions with colors that we could see that would be easily noticed if wrong such as blue skies, flesh tones of people, green grass and green foliage. There's little way to tell if the color in your two pictures are "correct".

I sure can! In a few hours

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I mention this earlier in the thread but I had the same issue. SC output tended to clip the extremes leaving very little headroom for further edits, with no histogram or way of actually seeing things clip before its too late. This is with Vuescan raw DNGs - not camera digitization - by the way.

I have been having the best luck with Vuescan raw inverted with ColorPerfect with no adjustments aside from making sure nothing is clipped, and then into my photo editor of choice (in this case LR) where I do the remainder of my color corrections and edits.

Esponscan tends to clip the ends as well when levels are on auto on the flatbed scanners. I have to set them manually. It tends to do a good job on auto but there is some data lost due to clipping.

 

[radialMelt]

Esponscan tends to clip the ends as well when levels are on auto on the flatbed scanners. I have to set them manually. It tends to do a good job on auto but there is some data lost due to clipping.

One of the benefits of Vuescan's raw output is that the data is saved prior to any adjustments by the software. So long as you don't clip the sensor, you won't lose data.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

One of the benefits of Vuescan's raw output is that the data is saved prior to any adjustments by the software. So long as you don't clip the sensor, you won't lose data.

But Viewscan, besides the scanning portion is just another photo editing program. You might as well scan flat with Epsonscan as i do and do all the editing in the program that you normally edit photos in. Why learn another photo editing program like Viewscan?

 

[cerber0s]

Can you show us conversions with colors that we could see that would be easily noticed if wrong such as blue skies, flesh tones of people, green grass and green foliage. There's little way to tell if the color in your two pictures are "correct".

 

[koraks]

Yeah, that's pretty cyan. Perfectly correctable to something pretty though.

 

[cerber0s]

Yeah, that's pretty cyan. Perfectly correctable to something pretty though.

Yes, I did nothing to it except increase density and saturation by two steps in the software.

 

[koraks]

Seems like a good starting point alright.