- Joined
- Jan 18, 2009
- Messages
- 2,587
- Location
- Fort Myers, FL
- Lightroom Experience
- Advanced
- Lightroom Version
- Classic
- Lightroom Version Number
- 9.2
- Operating System
- Windows 10
Is anyone using Negative Lab Pro?
While locked in for Covid I'm back to digitizing negatives and gave it another go. I tried it some time ago and was not overly impressed, but thought I would try again. Going to do two things in this post, one is give a bit of overview of what I see, but also hope to solicit other input to see if you are finding it worth the cost (about $100 +/-).
On the good side (for me) it operates on raw images and adjusts lightroom settings, as opposed to making a pass through TIFF (or whatever) and adjusting outside. That makes it a lot more efficient in terms of disk space and keeps it (sort of) in the lightroom workflow.
On the bad side, like all LR tools until Adobe will let us invert the tone curve earlier, it reverses (or just plain screws up) the sliders. So further adjustments are difficult in LR. So if your goal is to make "normal" adjustments inside LR, you are still limited to tools that invert the tone curve outside and bring a positive back into LR, e.g. Photoshop.
In the next few posts I'll put a bit of my experimentations and experience.
The product by the way is here: Negative Lab Pro
You get a free trial that allows you 12 negative conversions. It's actually better than that, as you can experiment but not save the results (i.e. their "apply") without it charging you for one of the 12.
Installation is fairly manual but easy -- you unzip the file, copy over a bunch of profiles into the LR profile area, and then add the plugin like any other plugin. It runs then off the File, Plug-in Extras menu.
The online instructions are a bit dated, they say:
Which concerned me, but the release note install instructions in the file say:
So it would appear whatever limitation was involved no longer exists. I did not turn off graphics in my experimenting.
More to follow...
While locked in for Covid I'm back to digitizing negatives and gave it another go. I tried it some time ago and was not overly impressed, but thought I would try again. Going to do two things in this post, one is give a bit of overview of what I see, but also hope to solicit other input to see if you are finding it worth the cost (about $100 +/-).
On the good side (for me) it operates on raw images and adjusts lightroom settings, as opposed to making a pass through TIFF (or whatever) and adjusting outside. That makes it a lot more efficient in terms of disk space and keeps it (sort of) in the lightroom workflow.
On the bad side, like all LR tools until Adobe will let us invert the tone curve earlier, it reverses (or just plain screws up) the sliders. So further adjustments are difficult in LR. So if your goal is to make "normal" adjustments inside LR, you are still limited to tools that invert the tone curve outside and bring a positive back into LR, e.g. Photoshop.
In the next few posts I'll put a bit of my experimentations and experience.
The product by the way is here: Negative Lab Pro
You get a free trial that allows you 12 negative conversions. It's actually better than that, as you can experiment but not save the results (i.e. their "apply") without it charging you for one of the 12.
Installation is fairly manual but easy -- you unzip the file, copy over a bunch of profiles into the LR profile area, and then add the plugin like any other plugin. It runs then off the File, Plug-in Extras menu.
The online instructions are a bit dated, they say:
IMPORTANT: Make sure to TURN OFF the “Use Graphics Processor” option in Lightroom if it is enabled. To do this, go to “Preferences > Performance” and un-check the “Use Graphics Processor” option.
Which concerned me, but the release note install instructions in the file say:
If you are using a version earlier than Lightroom Classic v9.0, mMake sure to TURN OFF the “Use Graphics Processor” option in Lightroom. To do this, go to “Preferences > Performance” and un-check the “Use Graphics Processor” option.
So it would appear whatever limitation was involved no longer exists. I did not turn off graphics in my experimenting.
More to follow...