A practical reference for the complete analog photography workflow. Updated May 2026.
Last year I wrote about why I scan my own film — the moment I realized a lab scan is someone else’s interpretation of my negative, not mine. That post covered the philosophy. This one covers the system.
Because somewhere between “I should really document how I do this” and the third time I forgot which export preset goes where, I sat down and wrote the whole thing out. Every step, from mounting the negative in the scanner to moving the final JPEG onto the NAS. Not because anyone asked — but because future me will forget, and present me was already starting to.
What came out of that is what I’m calling the Analog Film Workflow Cookbook. It’s a reference document, not a tutorial. No theory, no justification — just the steps, the settings, the shortcuts, and the folder paths. The kind of thing you pin next to your screen and glance at when you can’t remember whether the export color space is sRGB or Adobe RGB (it’s sRGB, almost always).
The full cookbook is available as a PDF download at the bottom of this post.
The complete pipeline. Seven steps, one roll at a time.
What It Covers
The cookbook follows a roll of film from the scanner to its final destination. In practice, that means ten sections:
Scanning — Epson V800 settings for B&W and color. 6400 DPI, TIFF, no sharpening, no dust removal. The scanner captures; I interpret later.
Importing into Lightroom — Add, don’t copy. Apply the NLP camera metadata preset. No develop settings on import — Negative Lab Pro needs the unmodified scan data.
Negative Lab Pro Conversion — The digital darkroom. NLP turns scans into positives, and from there Lightroom’s standard Develop tools work normally. This is where the negative becomes my interpretation.
Editing — A two-pass system. First pass: cull and color-label. Second pass: develop the keepers. Not every frame earns attention — that’s the point.
Color Labels — Five labels, each with a specific meaning and a specific export destination. Red is reference only. Yellow needs work. Green is good. Blue is portfolio. Purple is print-ready. No ambiguity, no “I’ll figure it out later.”
Exporting — Four presets covering portfolio (full-res and watermarked), print, and family sharing. Each one goes to a specific folder on the NAS. Consistent filenames across all destinations.
Virtual Copies — When to create them, when to delete them, how to label them. They’re free to make but they clutter the catalog if left as orphans.
NLP Metadata Presets — One preset per camera-and-lens combination. This is where the EXIF data gets embedded — camera make, lens model, film stock, ISO. The structured metadata that travels with every export.
Roll Folder Structure — Master TIFFs and contact sheet PDF. That’s it. No exports in the roll folder.
The Checklist — Eighteen steps, end to end. The whole process on one page.
Why Document This?
I shoot on four cameras — the Pentacon Six TL with three lenses, the Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 521/2, the Contina IIa, and a Holga. Each has its own NLP preset. Each has different scanning considerations. Each produces negatives that need different handling in conversion.
That’s a lot of variation for a workflow that’s supposed to be consistent. Writing it down forced me to standardize the things that should be standard (folder naming, export settings, color label meanings) and be explicit about the things that vary per roll (film stock, scan settings, NLP source type).
It also survived a full platform migration — from Windows to macOS, with a Synology NAS in the middle and a Lightroom catalog that needed to be rebuilt from scratch because of a known Adobe bug. Having the workflow documented meant I could verify that every step still worked on the new system, rather than discovering gaps three rolls later.
The Environment
For context — this is the system the cookbook was written for:
- MacBook Air M5, 1TB SSD, 32GB RAM
- Lightroom Classic with Negative Lab Pro
- Epson V800 flatbed scanner
- Synology NAS (2×8TB RAID) via Synology Drive sync
- SAAL Digital for prints (silk paper, ICC profile)
- Blurb for zine publishing (via BookWright)
Everything lives on the NAS. The Mac syncs working files locally via Synology Drive. The Lightroom catalog is local only — not synced, just backed up.
What’s Not In This Cookbook
Keywords and metadata tagging. That turned out to be its own project — adapting a 1,786-keyword foundation list to a focused analog workflow, figuring out where NLP metadata ends and keywords begin, and building a hierarchy that’s useful without being burdensome. That’s a separate post with its own cookbook. Coming soon.
Also not covered: the NAS migration itself. That’s documented in the NAS Migration Guide.
The Companion Keyword Cookbook
The workflow cookbook covers everything except how to keyword and tag images. That’s handled in a companion document — the Keyword Cookbook — which covers keyword architecture, the boundary between NLP metadata and keywords, and a three-pass keywording workflow that integrates with the editing process described here. When it’s published, I’ll link it here.
This is a living document. I update it when the workflow changes — new camera, new export destination, new lesson learned. The version linked below is current as of May 2026.
The complete Analog Film Workflow Cookbook as a PDF — all ten sections, all presets, all shortcuts. Print it or keep it on screen.
Download the Analog Film Workflow Cookbook (PDF)
© 2026 Henry
I publish my photography under my middle name Henry — a small tribute to my father Heinrich, and his lifelong love of making photographs.
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