Press

For release: October 25th or later
Contact: Nate Johnson (nate@natephotographic.com)

Key Points:

  • Even as more and more photographers are shooting analog film and digitizing their own color negatives, the workflow and software for converting those color negatives is still painfully slow (and only produces mediocre results).
  • Negative Lab Pro brings analog film photographers a fast, simple, all-RAW workflow for getting gorgeous Color Negative Film conversions. Features include:
    • 1-Click Color Negative Conversions in Lightroom
    • Batch Negative Conversions (so you can develop entire roll at once)
    • Simple, intuitive controls for fine-tuning tones and colors non-destructively
    • Gorgeous lab scanner emulations (Frontier and Noritsu)
    • Black & white negative conversions with advanced toning options
    • And lots more, like Auto-Color, Auto-Density, Tone Profiles, CMY color balancing…
  • A Free-Trial Download is available at https://www.negativelabpro.com . (During trial, you get unlimited previews, and up to 12 applications. You can purchase a full license for $99.)
  • Requires Lightroom 6 or Lightroom Classic CC

Negative Lab Pro: fast, beautiful color negative film conversions in Lightroom

For years, analog photographers have been looking for a better, simpler way to convert their scanned color negative film into positive images – one that didn’t require massive tiff exports or painfully tedious, hand-adjusted tone curves.

Today, their wait is over…

Negative Lab Pro finally brings fast, beautiful Color Negative conversions right into your Lightroom workflow.

With just one click, Negative Lab Pro analyzes color negatives film scans, and automatically create the perfect conversion settings. Afterwards, you can fine-tune colors and tones to your heart’s content with simple, intuitive controls. And yes, you can even recreate the gorgeous colors and tones you remember from the lab, with emulations for Frontier and Noritsu lab scanners.

It works as a plugin right inside Lightroom (at the moment, it supports Lightroom 6 and Lightroom Classic CC). Once you’ve scanned in your color negative (either with a flatbed scanner, or with the preferred DSLR-scanning method), just prepare your image by color balancing off the film border, and cropping carefully to only show the image (you can re-crop later if you want to show off your beautiful film border).

Then open up Negative Lab Pro and hit the “Convert” button. In a few seconds, your negative will be converted, and you can edit it further.

You can even “batch convert” a whole lot of negatives at once in the Library module. This feature is a huge time-save. No more exporting into Photoshop, and converting each individually.

While the initial negative conversions are excellent, Negative Lab Pro really shines in the powerful, yet simple editing controls it offers you after conversion.

You can fine-tune the strength of the image-specific Auto-Color and Auto-Density adjustments. Included Tone Profiles let you quickly adjust the tonal shape of your negative. You make also make precise adjustments inside the “Tone” and “Color Balance” sections of the tool

And since this is Lightroom, all the edits you make are non-destructive. Negative Lab Pro saves it’s image analysis and internal settings for each photo into special meta-data for each photo. So if you want to continue editing your negative later, you can pick up right where you left off.

(Oh, and did we mention it does amazing black and white negative conversion, too?)

The product was created by Nate Johnson, the owner of Nate Photographic, and has been in development for most of 2018. After nearly two months of testing in beta, photographers can finally get their hands on the official release.

“The response from film photographers so far has been incredible,” said Nate Johnson, creator of Negative Lab Pro. “Someone in the beta told me he is literally selling his $5,000 Fuji Frontier scanner now because he is getting better results using Negative Lab Pro and DSLR scanning setup. It’s been really remarkable to see the response.”

Photographers can download a free 12-shot trial here: https://www.negativelabpro.com.

A fully-unlocked license can be purchased for $99 (about what it cost to have 5 rolls of film scanned at a good lab, or about 1/50th the cost of a used Frontier scanner).