Not quite, the density depends on the development as well. Meaning you can have two negatives of the same exact scene, one exposed and developed normally, and the other underexposed two stops and then pushed in the development two stops (or one, or three) to compensate. The look will be quite different as the channels will shift non-linearly, meaning a given point’s individual channel density may be the same between the two negatives, but the tonal distribution of the values on both sides of that point will be different. This will not only affect the tone but also saturation and global contrast.
Overall the idea of smoothing looks interesting. I’m curious to see it in action as it is not quite clear how intuitive it will be to have this more dynamic relationship between the ratios.
I’ve been using negadoctor recently. I have some difficult to convert negatives, which have no apparent middle grays. These are sheet film so there are no adjacent frames to refer to. Although negadoctor’s approach to the color balancing is far less intuitive compared to filmneg, in one case the result was closer than I could achieve with filmneg so far. Suprisingly, NLP is the one giving the best result overall for that particular frame. Maybe it speaks more about my skill than the available software options though
What was a revelation to me regarding negadoctor, is how excellent its approach is when applied to B&W negatives. The result is outstanding and the control is so straightforward (and actually quite in line with a physical darkroom). I’ve been focusing primarily on B&W for some time now and the conversion part have been exceedingly difficult before. Something that might not come through as expected compared to the color negatives
Maybe a hybrid approach where the flow would resemble the negadoctor’s but the color balancing was based on filmneg’s exponents would be the ultimate solution.