My Nikon raw files also look very dark in the scene-referred method (using 3.2.1), as dark as in the screenshot a little higher in this thread. I was playing around with a +2 in exposure. I tried the basic adjustments module now for the first time and that seems to work better, even on auto.
If the exposure needs to be set before filmic (as is mention in this thread), why is the default order in DT 3.2.1 exposure after filmic?
I can’t answer about the default order, I took exposure before filmic from the darktable manual :
https://darktable.gitlab.io/doc/en/tone_group.html#filmic
It isn’t. Exposure comes before (lower down) filmic RGB.
@durian: Where do you get that order from? If I look in the left-most module tab (and in my styles) I see exposure below filmic. That means it’s applied before filmic…(note that those need to be read from the bottom towards the top).
And the reason you want to set exposure before adjusting filmic: exposure determines the “18% gray point”, which will not be changed when you adjust filmic. So setting exposure gives you the midtones where you want them, and filmic adjusts the shadows and highlights to be within an acceptable range.
I have used the preset a lot, and most of the times, the initial render was dark as you’ve mentioned.
The only change I did to get a good starting point was tweaking exposure. Only that. I never changed filmic settings, only exposure (if I recall, that was Aurèlien’s instruction about that preset)
Do not look at the history list at left.
Instead, look at the module order, at right.
There is a difference between legacy and current (v3.0) module order.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
Right, okay, learning every day, I like it 
It’s on “v3” order and in the active modules tab, filmic is above exposure, so all is good if I understand correctly?
When I choose scene-referred filmic and exposure are already applied.
Do I use exposure again (new instance?) if I’m not happy with the result?
A bit similar with the *.dtstyle from post #1 - works very well. But do I apply i.e. local contrast or sharpening again?
Yes. History is the order you did operations, while the Active Modules shows the “pixelpipe”, or processing order.
Yes.
I adjust the same instance unti I’m happy. Or until I hit the 3EV limit, then it is time for another instance. That doesn’t happen often though.
The ‘3 EV limit’ is only for the slider, right click on it and you can type in other values (4, 5 or even 6 EV, if you want). It also allows for precise input values. And once you enter a larger value, the slider accepts that as a new limit.
Yes: history shows not the processing order, but the order in which the user added / adjusted the modules. For the initial import, the “user added / adjusted modules” does not really mean anything: there, the modules provide a starting point.
Now, for the adjustments:
As Aurélien has mentioned in one of the videos, the colour matrices are optimised for midtones, therefore it makes sense to set the exposure correctly for the main subject first. Filmic, in all its iterations, is a tone-mapping tool that then allows you to define a white and black point, and how the values in-between will be mapped to the display / output. It won’t move the traditional 18% (18.45%, if I remember correctly; Lab L=50%) midtone, but will shift the other values.
I had a discussion about this on IRC a while ago and I think this is a misconception. Exposure adjustment is simple linear scaling of your rgb data, and a matrix profile is exactly that, a matrix. Matrix-scalar multiplication is commutative, so the order of exposure and input profile should not matter.
If you are using a LUT camera profile this is of course very different, and those may benefit from ‘correct’ exposure.
The ‘midtones’ you mention are probably not midtones in the sense of exposure, but saturation. Colour profiles are optimised around soft skin tones, because humans are very sensitive to that and if the skin tones are not right, the picture will look ‘off’. As a result, weird things happen with very saturated tones, especially blue ones as they are on the opposite site of the colour wheel compared to the pink/orange-ish hue of human skin.
Sure, the linear multiplication in exposure and the matrix multiplication are interchangeable; from what I remember Aurélien said that the matrix was just an approximation of the sensor response, and that approximation was optimised to produce the lowest errors around midtones. Therefore, it’d make sense to get exposure right, then apply the colourspace transformation, rather than converting from camera to working space, and then messing with the custom midtone point in filmic.
Not all input profiles are matrices, some people may use LUTs too (as a sort of ICC profile, or in the LUT modules), and for these profiles, anchoring grey first thing is important. Of course, for simple matrices, we don’t really care.
I ave made an icc profile using dcamprof which uses also LUT as you have mentioned so exactly what am I suppose to do? what do you mean by anchoring grey first?
Anchoring grey = set global exposure (exposure setting in exposure module) such that the image is legible and midtones are bright enough, with no care for highlights clipping (because they will be fixed later in filmic).
A recent suggestion was to drag the LUT module after filmic in the pipe to avoid conflict…so basically set the image tonally and exposure wise and then use the LUT on a nicely balance image…would you agree??
