No no. Filmic is an alternative to basecurve. It was never recommended to use both modules together and you shouldn’t.
Eh yes you are right, I typed to quickly I meant fixing it using other modules like curves, levels, etc.
The point about pipelines is technically correct but impossible to explain to a novice user. They should not care about pipeline order until they complete some basic courses on linear algebra, color theory and a few other things. Most photographers, even the professional ones, don’t have much background in either.
That’s the point about the current UX. It only makes sense if you are a hardcore graphics nerd. It’s better in this release mostly because it’s on by default with some sensible defaults. So, you can sort of ignore the fact that it’s there.
Most people aren’t graphics nerd but vaguely understand the notion of brightness and black and white. The net effect of using exposure with filmic is that you are basically managing those 3 things with a pleasing curve that magically maps what your camera produced to what your display and output mediums can handle without a lot of fuss.
The optimal UX for that would be a much smaller number of sliders than exposure plus filmic currently provide that most users stand no chance in hell of ever fully understanding. IMHO each of the four tabs in filmic could basically be a separate module. And prior to filmic they basically were. And those modules are still around, which adds to the confusion because which ones should you use and why? Filmic is almost like a pipeline in a pipeline and the exposure module is basically the first module in that pipeline, which also includes tweaking blackpoint/whitepoint (tab 1), highlights (tab2), look (tab3), and output (tab4).
If you are familiar with it, it’s basically the law of leaky abstractions. Filmic is complex because it doesn’t really fit Darktable’s UX paradigm of modules being independent things in the graphics pipelines, which is why it is grouping logically different things in one module because their implementations is basically one thing in the pipeline instead of four. For the same reason it’s just four things when really it should be five things if you add exposure to the mix.