Recent alternative to Negative Lab Pro - I don't remember the name

PhilBurton · Dec 23, 2021

Must be that proverbial "senior moment." I remember reading a newly announced competitor to Negative Lab Pro, with some impressive claims about its features. I also remember that the author does NOT offer a free trial.

If it matters, I intend to use either NLP or this alternative with Lightroom running on Windows 10. My scanner is a Nikon 5000 with Silverfast 9. I do my post work in Lightroom with occasional trips to Photoshop.

Can someone jog my memory?

Thanks,

Phil Burton

Moose22 · Dec 24, 2021

Doesn't do black and white, though.

I'm not very good with it as I haven't been doing much color lately, but I do have it. It works, and its little toolbox is good.

Weird, convoluted process getting it installed and in the workflow... but that's adobe. Everything about adobe has to be way harder than it should be. But for that you get to work in positive instead of negative, which is nice.

ColdEye · Dec 24, 2021

Is there a program like this that does not have to be tied to photoshop? I have an old version of lightroom.

albireo · Dec 24, 2021

RE OP's question

https://grain2pixel.com/

Grain2pixel perhaps? Been around for a while though.

Adrian Bacon · Dec 24, 2021

I'm working on a version of simple image tools that will output tiff files, won't require anything from adobe, have a reasonably nice UI, and will run on multiple platforms. It's been really slow going though simply because I've been ridiculously busy with other paid work. There's clearly a market for negative film scanning software that doesn't rely on Adobe.

PhilBurton · Dec 24, 2021

albireo said:
RE OP's question

https://grain2pixel.com/

Grain2pixel perhaps? Been around for a while though.

No, but thanks for the reply. I am needing a plug-in that works natively with Lightroom Classic (not CC or mobile).

PhilBurton · Dec 24, 2021

Old Gregg said:
https://negmaster.com/ and I prefer it to NLP indeed.

@Old Gregg I don't always agree with you but I recognize the quality and experience of your comments in this forum.

Why do you prefer it to NLP? With Lightroom Classic?

is the lack of B&W support an issue for you?

PhilBurton · Dec 24, 2021

Moose22 said:
Doesn't do black and white, though.

Oooh, Not explicitly stated on the website. A concern for me.

I'm not very good with it as I haven't been doing much color lately, but I do have it. It works, and its little toolbox is good.

Weird, convoluted process getting it installed and in the workflow... but that's adobe. Everything about adobe has to be way harder than it should be. But for that you get to work in positive instead of negative, which is nice.

I'm not sure I follow you here. To be clear, I haven't used either NLP in trial mode nor have I purchased negmaster. However, I assumed that the very first operation in LR is to do the negative inversion. Then use all the same tools that you would for a digital-native application. No?

I'm no Adobe fanboy (don't get me started on Acrobat and on their "support") and I think that for the most part Lightroom Desktop (or Classic) fulfills its promise of total end-to-end support for post-processing, particularly since the Adobe subscription plan also includes Photoshop. I haven't tried to use the web-based Lightroom CC nor Lightroom on my phone or tablet. The Classic user-interface could use some improvement. I use Lightroom for my own Nikon NEF and iPhone/iPad photos in JPG, but also Canon CR2 RAW files that friends have sent me and JPG photos from family members from their phones.

Before I standardized on Lightroom, I cobbled together a serious of standalone applications for cataloging (Photo Supreme, awful, awful in several different ways), editing (Nikon Capture. various lens correction programs), etc. Awful.

PhilBurton · Dec 24, 2021

Adrian Bacon said:
I'm working on a version of simple image tools that will output tiff files, won't require anything from adobe, have a reasonably nice UI, and will run on multiple platforms. It's been really slow going though simply because I've been ridiculously busy with other paid work. There's clearly a market for negative film scanning software that doesn't rely on Adobe.

@Adrian Bacon

Your are another poster in this forum whose posts I read carefully.

Can I offer a different perspective. (disclosure: Most of my career I was a product manager/director for commercial software for B2B, Business2Business, products, not consumer products. )

While I'm sure that there is a general market for software that is not from Adobe (or any other company with a subscription model), I feel that it is important to distinguish between an economic rationale for avoiding such products, or "hostility" to Adobe (which they richly deserve at times.)

While corporations once wrote all their own applications (in COBOL), they now buy commercial applications and configure/customize it to their needs. Much more economical.

As a consumer I have spent lots and lots of money over the years for Nikon bodies and glass, and more money to upgrade my PC every 5-6 years. I build my own PCs so I can "tune" my desktop to photo processing. Compared to all that spending, $10/month to Adobe is redicuously cheap. It is not much more money than I spent, on a yearly basis, for Lightroom 4, 5, 6.

As a software developer it's tough to make money on commercial software. Running on multiple platforms, even if you exclude various flavors of Linux, adds completely, if only for the UI testing. And UI design is a separate art from classical software engineering (speaking from my own direct experience.) And a good UI is still no substitute for some kind of user manual or help files. Documentation is always a time sink. For a really, really bad UI and poor documentation, check out Photo Supreme from www.idimager.com.

I assume that you are doing custom projects as a consultant. As a product management consultant, I once had a European company that did custom software development, but wanted to get into commercial, packaged software (for both business and consumer usage). They failed miserably, even though they were successful with custom work.

Wearing my "product manager hat," it seems that you might be in two distinct, but adjacent markets.

1. Software for running a scanner and producing digital files. Vuescan and Silverfast have this market sewn up.
2. Software for full-on editing of digital files that originated as film negatives. Besides Adobe, there are several other companies that sell this sort of software. Some are one-time purchase and relatively low cost.

Will be happy to discuss further with you. Send me a PM.

Phil Burton

PhilBurton · Dec 24, 2021

Old Gregg said:
@Adrian Bacon count me as a beta tester. I said this before and I will repeat this again: the market for mini-labs is much more lucrative than consumers. Give them a scalable replacement for Noritsu workflow (those are dying everywhere), charge them a monthly subscription, and you will be rewarded with customers who appreciate your product.

Once you drop below a certain price point, you're exposing yourself to the world of morons who'll feel entitled to hours of your support time to help them troubleshoot the USB connection for their camera, just because they sent you their precious $99 two years ago.

As a one-man operation, avoid doing business with customers who can't afford $1K per year. Serving those markets requires substantial upfront investment and I am not sure that film scanning is big enough for that.

@Adrian Bacon

What @Old Gregg says here complete sense, and he knows way more than I do about mini-labs (which is essentially nothing). I would only add that your biggest challenge may be pricing. You could have a price price, plus annual maintenance, or a monthly subscription. I am sure that @Old Gregg will have good advice about this choice.

PhilBurton · Dec 25, 2021

Old Gregg said:
TBH it has more to do with NLP. It tries to be too "smart" aggressively clipping channels or fighting color casts that were actually in the scene, it reminds me of Photoshop's "auto-color" function, if you ever used that.

And that function only works well for "balanced light" subjects. A lot of my railroad subject photography has one predominant color, e.g. the red locomotive or the orange subway station tile.

Despite seemingly more complex interface, Negmaster basically has a single setting (called "auto balance") which has an optimal value for each film emulsion, you will have to determine that experimentally. Once you tune that in, Negmaster output is extremely close to manual inversions, only flatter - and you want that to apply your own contrast curve. That's the 2nd difference: Negmaster aims to produce a starting point for your further corrections, while NLP tries to give you the finished image.

One caveat is that Negmaster, in its pursuit of being a "digital RA4 paper" (a term I'm stealing from Adrian) is more sensitive to your scanning quality, i.e. the light source and digital camera exposure. NLP, on the other hand, always tries to fix all your wrongs, again just like Photoshop's autocolor+autocontrast would.

OK. I'm beginning to see why I would probably prefer Negmaster to NLP, despite all the favorable attention to NLP.

That being said, NLP quirks can be learned with enough practice. In the end, you will be able to produce 3 absolutely images indistinguishable from each other: one from NLP, another from Negmaster, and the manual.

Happy Holidays!

Thanks for this explanation. I'm going to join the Negmasters Facebook group so I can do a deep dive into this software.

250swb · Dec 26, 2021

In Windows 10 and Photoshop I use both Negmaster and ColorPerfect because they are the only ones that work with Photoshop. Either of them can invert B&W or colour negatives to perfection. For inverting B&W you do have to make sure there is no film base showing or you can get false colour, but I just leave both set to 'Colour' and press 'go'. I don't adjust the programmes to work specifically in B&W because I want an RGB TIFF file as the output (so it works straight off in Silver Efex Pro) and not a Greyscale file. I use ColorPerfect because it's fast and when I don't want to make any adjustments to what it automatically does, which is most of the time, and Negmaster when something needs tweaking.

Steve@f8 · Dec 26, 2021

For colour negs I use my Plustek Ai with the Silverfast suite, but now and agin I would like to use a digital camera to take a ‘snapshot‘ of the colour neg, eg for panoramic negs. It’s so infrequent that I would prefer, if possible, to use Adobe LR and or Photoshop.

My question, is there a LR/Photoshop ‘formula’ to obtain a ‘reasonable’ conversion that I could save as a preset? And am I right in thinking a good start would be to negate the orange mask?

grat · Dec 26, 2021

I don't know about "formula"-- but having done the odd scan with my DSLR, with the white balance set to match the white balance of my light source, load the image into Affinity, and use the "blue" mask to set the white point, and then invert, followed by per-channel levels adjustment, usually gets me into the ball park. Affinity has an "auto-color" button that seems to help with this process as well.

For trickier negatives, I use Darktable's "negadoctor" module.

Steve@f8 · Dec 26, 2021

grat said:
I don't know about "formula"-- but having done the odd scan with my DSLR, with the white balance set to match the white balance of my light source, load the image into Affinity, and use the "blue" mask to set the white point, and then invert, followed by per-channel levels adjustment, usually gets me into the ball park. Affinity has an "auto-color" button that seems to help with this process as well.

For trickier negatives, I use Darktable's "negadoctor" module.

Thanks, I think I get the idea, I’ll give it a go in LR.

PhilBurton · Dec 27, 2021

Steve@f8 said:
For colour negs I use my Plustek Ai with the Silverfast suite, but now and agin I would like to use a digital camera to take a ‘snapshot‘ of the colour neg, eg for panoramic negs. It’s so infrequent that I would prefer, if possible, to use Adobe LR and or Photoshop.

My question, is there a LR/Photoshop ‘formula’ to obtain a ‘reasonable’ conversion that I could save as a preset? And am I right in thinking a good start would be to negate the orange mask?

By this question, do you mean that you could eliminate the need for NLP or Negmaster?

Do you have just the base version of SF 9, or the base version plus the add-on?

Steve@f8 · Dec 27, 2021

PhilBurton said:
By this question, do you mean that you could eliminate the need for NLP or Negmaster?

Do you have just the base version of SF 9, or the base version plus the add-on?

Yes that’s the idea. For the amount of colour negs I plan to do outside of Silverfast using the Plustek, ie for wide angle a la XPan look-a-like where the neg is too long for the Plustek gate, then I need an alternative, ideally without purchasing extra software such as NLP or Negmaster.
When you say SF 9, I suspect that’s Silverfast. My computer is off at the moment so can’t say whether or not it’s ver 9. But the S/W is tied to the Plustek and i believe it can’t be used to convert camera ‘scans’ as far as I know.

PhilBurton · Dec 30, 2021

Steve@f8 said:
Yes that’s the idea. For the amount of colour negs I plan to do outside of Silverfast using the Plustek, ie for wide angle a la XPan look-a-like where the neg is too long for the Plustek gate, then I need an alternative, ideally without purchasing extra software such as NLP or Negmaster.
When you say SF 9, I suspect that’s Silverfast. My computer is off at the moment so can’t say whether or not it’s ver 9. But the S/W is tied to the Plustek and i believe it can’t be used to convert camera ‘scans’ as far as I know.

Yes, I did mean Silverfast 9.

yeolde · Feb 18, 2022

Why not like NLP?

PhilBurton · Feb 18, 2022

yeolde said:
Why not like NLP?

I don't, but if I could use SF to accomplish the same goal, that's one less step in my workflow.

About Negmaster. I've read some pretty extravagant claims about why it is better the NLP. However, it does NOT do B&W. To be clear, I haven't yet down an NLP trial. I'm annoyed that Negmaster doesn't offer a trial.

yeolde · Feb 18, 2022

In my case with a gigabyte files from creo scanner SF simply do not work (((((

Recent alternative to Negative Lab Pro - I don't remember the name

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