Forget Negative Lab Pro; All you need is Capture One Pro 23

Written By Stuart Weir

A guide to save you money and time

…Or how to avoid buying expensive plugins or pay monthly fees just to convert your Film Scans.

How I fell down this rabbit hole

If you’re anything like me, when you dive into things, you dive in head first, become obsessive about every little detail, and then still wonder if you’re missing something. Maybe it’s because I’m a software developer by profession, but I always seem to believe that things can be done better than they are currently, which is why I set out on the path of teaching myself to edit my Film Scans in Capture One Pro 23. No plugins, no additional fees, monthly or otherwise. Just plain ol’ Capture One.

I set out to do this because, well, I got sick of paying a monthly fee (Adobe) just so I could use Negative Lab Pro (NLP). In Canadian dollars, I was spending about $200 a year in Adobe subscriptions just so I could use a 3rd party plugin. That money never made it into the hands of the creator of NLP; he only made money when I initially bought the plugin license. Additionally, I shoot Fuji cameras, I scan my film using my Fuji camera, and Adobe does not play nice with Fuji .RAF files. You can’t tell me different, the worm artifacts in Adobe are still present. And when you’re talking about film grain… I don’t want that ruined by Worm Artifacts. That’s why for all my digital work, I was using Capture One Pro 23. However, there was just one problem…

Capture One Pro 23 doesn’t have a plugin for converting film negatives (on Windows)

Not only does Capture One Pro 23 not have a plugin for converting film negatives, but the blog posts I’ve seen on the internet about how to do this in C1 are either:

  • Outdated

  • Inconsistent

  • Unclear

That’s why I’m writing this blog post. By the time you’re done reading this post, you’ll have everything you need to convert your negatives in Capture One Pro 23. For free (though I would love shout outs on Socials if you find this helpful at all, even if it’s just knowing I helped one person!).

Does this work for Colour, as well as B&W?

Yes.

Step by Step Guide:

Step 1: Flip, Crop, Rotate

In my case, this negative is an exact mirror image on the vertical axis. So I Flip Vertical, then rotate Right. I have already cropped the image to just the border.

It should look like this after:

Notice my Flip is set to Vertical.

Step 2: Set the proper Curve (Linear Response)

Step 3: White Balance off the border, Invert Levels

Notice the Levels section: I set this to 255/0/0. Normally, it is 0/0/255. For White Balance, I use the ‘W’ hotkey to white balance off the black border.

Step 4: Auto-adjust Levels (the Magic Wand in the Levels section), minor adjustments to midpoint in Levels and High Dynamic Range

I typically move the midpoint in the RGB levels tab left until the image looks like it has good “Density”. Then adjust the High Dynamic Range section.

Step 5: We’re done! Unless you want to make a Style out of this so you have to do less work.

BONUS: Making a C1 Style to Save additional time and Effort

Click the 3 dots in the top right section of the Styles and Presets section and hit “Save Style”. All you need are these options clicked. NOTE: Do not have Black & White enabled (clicked) if you want to save a similar preset, but for Colour.

Additional Tips I have found useful

  • Apply all the changes on one image from a roll of film. Once this is completed, copy and then paste all changes to the rest of the images on the roll.

    • Capture One is incredibly good at getting consistent looks across all images you copy to. It’s near instantaneous, unlike NLP…

  • This whole process should take you all of 5 minutes to complete for an entire roll of film, unless there are some particularly tricky elements.

Applying this to Colour Negative Film

  • The key things to note here are:

    • White Balance is your friend. Start with White Balance adjustments.

    • Don’t be afraid to make very minor edits to the R,G,B Levels

Stuart Weir