Can I BEAT Negative Lab Pro? how to convert negative film scans manually

Negative Lab Pro is basically an essential tool for film photographers. With that said, it is possible to convert your film scans manually without the tool. Using tone curves, you can get a lot done.
0:00 Intro
4:55 Before and After
9:22 Conversion with NLP
10:10 Me vs NLP, Comparison #1
12:28 Me vs NLP, Comparison #2
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[@Resgerr]

Thanks for this Ribsy - entertaining and I learnt a lot. Heard a lot of people talking about Neg Lab Pro - now I’ve seen it at work it’s fast!

[@ribsy]

Haha yea it’s a great tool

[@tylerhuttosmith]

Negative Lab Pro uses magic, clearly. Btw, I got Contact High and you were right! It’s so cool to see not only the history, but what was going on in the photographer’s and artists heads at the time. Almost like a day in the life of each artist.

[@ribsy]

Haha it does use some magic, and I’m glad you enjoyed contact high!

[@wotakutrash]

Really digging the content in this video. Never realized how easy this whole process is to do on your own. Definitely not going to stop using NLP, but I need to give this whole process a shot and see what comes out. Thanks for the tutorial.

[@ribsy]

Yea it’s not too tough to get something decent but NLP is better haha

[@bryanswisshelm941]

This is in the top edit instruction videos of all time for me. I learned so much about convert and tone curves. Thank you!!

[@ribsy]

thanks!

[@SinaFarhat]

Nice! Good to be able to see your process! :)

[@ribsy]

thanks for watching 😊

[@bobo.camera]

I would love to see a comparison between NLP scans and your darkroom prints, especially the color and tonality differences

[@ribsy]

yea that would be interesting

[@primary.elements]

PLEASE

[@CineStillFilm]

👏🏻 👏🏻 👏🏻 Great job. You actually made manually inverting color negatives look easy! Could you improve your conversion? Yes. Could the NLP conversion also be improved? Yes. But you didn’t even mess with the settings in NLP, and it gives you way more control. You can tweak an image endlessly, but at a certain point you settle for what you’ve got. With NLP you are like 100 steps ahead of doing it manually. We owe them a lot to opening up camera scanning as a viable option for converting your negatives to digital. But it’s good to show that you can convert your negatives yourself before making the smart investment in their product or just sending to the lab. We are all about demystifying film photography and converting negatives has been one of the biggest obstacles for a long tine. Before NLP it was an extremely specialized skill set, which really only left pro lab scanning as the only viable option. Now there are multiple. And in the end it’s a matter of how much time do you want to spend shooting vs in front of a computer. You can go full DIY, as you have shown here, use a pro lab and not touch a computer, or just spend some cathartic time in the darkroom. There is not one solution. Film photography is whatever you want it to be to you. Analog is a real-world experience and it is accessible! Keep up the great work!

[@ribsy]

thanks for watching. yea its fun and rewarding to be able to do the conversion on my own

[@NatePhotographic]

Well said, @CineStill_Film! Couldn't agree more!

[@jw48335]

@@ribsy Hey Ribsy! Have you tried negmaster yet? Man, I'm so excited having processed a couple rolls with that in my workflow instead of NLP. I always have a tendency to futz around with NLP results but I'm finding myself not having to do that nearly as much with negmaster. I'd be super interested in your assessment of that software. The developers are super responsive to questions too. I tried Filmlab again recently too, and while it's come a long way, I found it insufficient for my needs. Cheers!

[@owenhaupt]

This is a great video! Even as someone who will likely continue using NLP, watching this still helps exercise my brain

[@ribsy]

totally agreed!

[@jrago8198]

Another amazing video Ribsy, and such stunning images!!! The way you articulated your manual process is so easily digestable man....bravo! regarding your portrait and the balancing of the border... have you tried the dropper tool on this?? May have to export 1st perhaps so as not to mess with your prior RGB curve adjustments?

[@ribsy]

thanks for watching. you can fine tune it much better on PS. check out alex burke

[@andymiller4971]

Thanks for the clip , very informative .

[@ribsy]

thanks for watching!

[@aram4854]

Excellent thanks for doing this

[@ribsy]

For sure!

[@petemc5070]

Really helpful walk-through. Thank you.

[@ribsy]

you are welcome

[@andyfan1022]

Great job!

[@ribsy]

thanks!

[@poniatowski3547]

big props for trying to convert manually as good as - lap pro! great vid.

[@ribsy]

thanks for watching

[@Renzsu]

To judge the histogram a bit better, I would crop out the film border first, so you know that the blacks and whites are in your picture, not in something like film border or even film holder.

[@tubecorr]

NLP is a godsend! I used to manually do all my negative conversions but was never really satisfied with the results. It would take me way too long and I could never decide on the final look I wanted.

[@ribsy]

It is! Amen to that

[@Notimportant1995]

You did a great job man, your mind would be blown if you were to start using Capture one, set your layers and as you “scan” with your DSLR it would auto convert into edited positives instantly. It’s mostly used in the commercial world but I use it to edit all of my scans of my prints before retouch in photoshop.

[@ribsy]

yea thats pretty cool, rather stick to lightroom tho!

[@martinmonk9504]

I highly recommend you do manual conversions in Photoshop instead of LR. Also, make sure to make your initial level adjustments separately for each of R, G and B channels and also to white balance off of the film border beforehand in Camera Raw. With that, I have better results than with NLP. PS: That little bit of information you threw out is the film border. Since it's inverted, that little portion is the black border, so the shadow portion. No problem throwing that away but it will vary between the primary colors which is why each channel should be adjusted individually at the start.

[@bhop0073]

I agree that you should learn how and understand how it all works and be able to do it, but if you're processing a whole roll of film or more, the time involved makes NLP well worth the price since you can batch process in a short amount of time. You can make edits to whatever NLP starts with and save a lot of time.

[@martinmonk9504]

​@@bhop0073 Yeah for sure. I use both :) With "do... instead" I meant Photoshop rather than Lightroom for manual work.

[@ribsy]

Thanks for suggestion. Will try PS

[@ribsy]

Yea sometimes it’s just not feasible

[@ribsy]

All can work 😃

[@lensman5762]

Very very informative. Just a couple of points. The data on the histogram on the right hand side, in the beginning of the edit, is the result of the borders being present in the scan, and can be totally ignored as you correctly suggested. Once the initial white balance on the borders have been carried out and the image exported, it is worth carrying out the same operation on the image a couple of times, before further editing of the RGB channels. This was a very interesting presentation. Thanks.

[@ribsy]

thanks for watching

[@NorbiWhitney]

I used to use some Photoshop actions I found online, because my manual curves adjustments were useless, haha, but then NLP came along and changed everything! Especially after that 2.2 update.

[@ribsy]

Yea NLP is the way to go

[@mchlhth]

I purchased Negative Lab Pro for the exact reason you show here, Ribsy. Tweaking a raw file with an inverted profile by eye and memory and guessing what the best look for the film I used is just takes way too much time, and, for my tastes, the results are usually not as good as starting with the NLP base (which, for those who may not know, you can batch process as many files as you like - I usually do whole rolls at once, or several rolls if I used the same emulsion) and making small adjustments from there. Wasn’t watching the video to have my biases confirmed, but this served as a reminder of how much a pain in the ass things were before NLP was available.

[@ribsy]

Haha for real. Like after NLP is better

[@mp3remix171]

just set the whitebalance point to that part of the image that was suppose to be pure white, ande the black point to the filmborder (always the blackpoint for the neg since it has seen no light), that should give you a way better starting point for your process! :)

[@ribsy]

Thanks - will give that a go

[@peterfarr9591]

Alex Burke has some really excellent videos on manual conversion in photoshop. It's definitely an art! IMO it's a good skill to learn. Nothing is perfect (even negative lab pro) and with color negative film there's almost always some cast to work out.

[@ribsy]

Yea I’ve seen a couple! He’s good at it haha

[@peterfarr9591]

@@ribsy i just got some drum scans back from him. He's amazing at them! I've never seen my stuff look so good.

[@julian-tm7mw]

thx for the video it was very very helpful since i dont want to spend 100 dollars on NGLP and now just take like 5 minutes and do that with every photo

[@ribsy]

gotcha. NLP is def worth the money tho

[@waisehell]

Another alternative most people don't know about is Darktable with the negadoctor module. I got very similar results compared to the NLP trial.

[@ribsy]

yea i should give it a try

[@deniz2265]

Hello, you still have to put the black and white point. This reduces slightly slight color shifts. Thanks for your videos. I like to look at.

[@ribsy]

good point!

[@user-pk3kd2ke1n]

Comparing with taking the whole image, how many more details have you captured with this method?

[@heres_the_sauce]

Man the difference is crazy

[@ribsy]

Yea it is! Not perfect by any means

[@oxentielreadman]

Negative Lab Pro is way better and faster than do the inversion manually. Recently Darktable (the open-source option to lightroom) introduced the "negativedoctor" a module to work with film negatives. Doesnt have the scanner profiles but do a very good and fast job.

[@ribsy]

yea its a great tool. would never want to do the work on my own

[@MrLukeod]

I would seriously recommend watching some Alex Burke videos. I got NLP and it's useful for batches, but for the keepers PS gives far better results with a few simple layers, plus you know what's actually happening.

[@Crsmo322]

I picked up my technique from Alex's site. From there I adjusted it to my simpler way of doing it. It's still not as fast as using NLP, but it's a money saver if you're on a budget. 👍🏼

[@ribsy]

yea for sure! i've seen them and im gonna try his exact process for a video. works very well

[@ribsy]

yea its def great if you don't have NLP. but time is money!

[@yutaikeya945]

Recently in Facebook digital scan group, there are people trying to develop so-called trichromatic scanning method where they use RGB light sources (either separately to combine shots later, or mixed light source and one-shot) to derive "theoretically correct" color rendering. The idea is that all industrial film scanners are using three different channel sensors to get the image (I heard). Even using "white" light source with mixed RGB LEDs mixed performs better than those white flat LED panels that everyone uses, as there is less channel overlap between RGB. NLP is not used for this method as it uses special formula to play with the channels. Instead they do rather manual conversion. It seems that the guy of Grain2Pixel is trying to equip trichromatic function on coming pro-version. I personally love NLP for its quick yet decent results, but I am curious how this trichromatic method is going to be developed in the future. When it becomes easy to perform, it could beat NLP with its accuracy. I love how you constantly make videos about the technical subjects, so I'd love to see your trichromatic scan in near future;)

[@ribsy]

thats very interesting. seems like alot of work haha but would make for a fun experiment

[@hkraytai]

Do you shoot b/w and if so is NLP worth it for b/w negatives when you can invert in PS?

[@ribsy]

Still worth it for the workflow

[@housemusic325]

What about Darktable with negadoctor ? I do all my negatives with this, and it gives good result for me

[@ribsy]

i have never tried it! will lookin to it

[@yetanotherbassdude]

Just wish NLP was available as a standalone software rather than only as a plugin for Lightroom! I use Capture One rather than Lightroom as my digital setup is a Fuji X-Series. I'm not ditching that workflow now but dealing with the negatives I'm now producing as a newly reintroduced film shooter is really difficult. I don't expect NLP to be rebuilt as a C1 add-on when LR is so dominant in the market, but even a barebones standalone converter would be so much better for me and anyone that doesn't want to use LR!

[@ribsy]

Yea I feel you!

[@callmedeaconbooze]

Regarding the second picture there is a quick Photoshop fix to remove the color cast

[@ribsy]

yea you can do alot in photoshop. and you can control it more as well

[@thenexthobby]

I like the idea of using NLP as a base for further edits. All these people saying the PS results can be better must be doing something at the very outset that cannot be corrected afterwards if starting from NLP, which doesn't make sense to me. I mean, if you're a PS expert you should be able to do anything so long as you aren't starting with a lo-res file. And NLP is seconds vs minutes getting to that point. When I consider what a few boxes of film costs, NLP is nothing.

[@ribsy]

yea def. NLP is 100% worth the cost 🤟🏽

[@Benitico78]

Is NLP better that Silverfast?

[@ribsy]

They are intended for different purposes. With that said I like the colors way more on NLP

[@sonygoup]

TBH I hacked it when it first came out and just stuck with Silver fast and LR

[@joeltunnah]

Prefer Silverfast too.

[@ribsy]

yea i got you. i never fully like those results tho. NLP is the way for me

[@ribsy]

silverfast was good enough but i prefer NLP for the conversion

[@sonygoup]

@@ribsy can I just say the price tag is heavy for a plugin then having to pay for Lightroom monthly. I was hoping as the plugin became more popular, that he would have dropped the cost but guess not. There is a group on FB with a bunch of other plugins that work in Photoshop but I've never tried em, results look good but its not a as smooth results

[@joeltunnah]

This is why I prefer b&w.😂

[@ribsy]

hahaha i feel you

You clipped your color channels way too much. The black and white point for each channel needs to be set, and don't touch it after that , and then just modify the color the midpoint. You can get way better results with photoshop ,that can be almost fully automatic. Anyway, if your interested I can show you how to do it better, faster.

[@ribsy]

thanks for suggestion 😊

[@TheBigNegative-PhotoChannel]

Me with a Leica in each hand. IS THE PRICE REALLY WORTH IT? 😂 come on guys it's not that pricey.

[@ribsy]

LOL exactly!

[@slothsarecool]

Is it just me or do the film stocks not really matter, most of the look comes from the software anyway, maybe with the exception of something like cinestill

[@ribsy]

They def have innate differences especially when doing all analog processes. But you can do a lot with digital scans for sure