…and I think this is the bit that has always tripped me up when I tried using filmic so far: It seems to assume that the middle grey in the image it gets stays the middle grey in the output, but this is not obvious from the GUI. (or am I wrong about this? At least there doesn’t seem to be a direct way of defining which input is mapped to middle grey).
Since I switched to shooting RAW with MagicLantern, I’m using the ETTL module almost always. SO everything is exposed for the highlights, and that means my middle grey is just 18% if the brightest parts of the scene. And filmic RGB changes the brightness of the image quite a bit, I was trying to set the exposure at the same time as the exposure range, because I find that the most intuitive thing to do, particularly if a picture has a large dynamic range, but I’m not sure if I can preserve it all while also keeping enough contrast on the main subject.
So, I then had to go back and forth between filmic and the exposure module, and every time I change exposure, I need to readjust filmic. If everything before filmic works in linear RGB, then those processing steps should be mostly independent of where middle grey is, shouldn’t they? This then means that it should be possible to have a workflow that defines what I want to map to middle grey in the filmic RGB module. That way, the exposure module becomes unnecessary (except for masked local adjustments), and users could define the limits of the exposure range in the same step as the middle, which should reduce the number of times you need to go back and forth, and also remove the need to adjust exposure before everything else, which can also be unintuitive, given how much filmic can change the overall appearance of the whole picture (and given that in some cases, I may not /want/ to map my subject precisely to middle grey).