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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[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.

[bryanswisshelm]

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

[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!

[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.

[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!

[bobo.camera]

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

[owenhaupt]

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

[SinaFarhat]

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

[andymiller]

Thanks for the clip, very informative .

[jrago]

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?

[poniatowski]

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

[petemc]

Really helpful walk-through. Thank you.

[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.

[martinmonk]

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.

[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.

[Notimportant]

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.

[lensman]

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.

[mpremix]

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! :)

[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.

[julian-tmmw]

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