Every film photographer who digitizes their negatives at home has come across the same issue: which negative conversion software is the best?
Negative Lab Pro isn’t just for color negatives it’s also an incredible tool for black and white film processing. Negative Lab Pro gives you full control over how to interpret the very brightest and darkest parts of your scan, all non-destructively. This is one of the advantages of a fully-raw, non-destructive process while the default is set to push the black point and white point to just before clipping, you have full, non-destructive control over this.
In this video, Kyle McDougall does a pretty rigorous comparison of two types of scanning software: Negative Lab Pro and Vuescan. To do so, he takes four color negatives from four different types of 35mm film: Kodak Portra 400, Kodak Ektar, Fuji Pro 400H, and Cinestill 50D. Like several of the comparisons/experiments that McDougall has done previously, this one takes a deep dive into a topic that is really important to many film photographers.
Vuescan For Windows 10
Personally, I use Negative Lab Pro at home, and I have really enjoyed using it over the software that came with my Epson scanner. In all honesty, I think that using Negative Lab Pro has really fueled my passion for shooting film with how easy it is to get negative conversions at home like I would expect to get back from a lab. Even in the comparison with Vuescan, I think it's night and day.
Vuescan License
What do you think about the results from McDougall's comparison? Did you have a preference? And if you shoot film, do you have a preferred software for converting your color negatives?