I’m sorry – you just don’t get it. Please pay attention to this strip of text from a post above:
here’s one taken to extreme because I don’t have a better recent example
If you’re having a rough morning, please understand that I’m here to get help, not to be told I’m an idiot.
I am trying to remember if you were on windows?? If so you can download Bill’s windows insider weekly build if you want to try it out…
Not yet. I’d rather wait for the official release. I just don’t really want to use a preproduction sample on daily basis. 
Thank you for the samples though.
NP I run multiple versions for testing…its nice to be able to test the features…most thing making the master are pretty stable but I hear you…
I think I do get it, I just do not agree with your methodology as shown in the post. where you have pushed almost everything you used to extreme, and for me unrealistic, values.
And if I thought you were an idiot, I wouldn’t bother replying. I’ve learned a long time ago that that’s just an efficient way of wasting my time (lots of it…)
Only very briefly. Opened a bunch of recent files of mine but the pastel look was immediately noticeable compared to RT despite colorfulness preset being used. Extreme colours like orange warning signs at road works turned toward red with the latter preset.
I’ve been emphasizing that my comments are not about “punch” or straight forward desaturation. For many years my photos were desaturated compared to the scene now I’m inching closer to realism from the flat side.
My short advice would be this …leave it on the defaults. Adjust white and black relative as needed and less often contrast. You can certainly try one of the other preservation modes at any time but you can usually go with powernorm or Euclidean, although maxRGB seems to be the new default for v6. Use the waveform histogram as your editing guide as it can tell you a lot esp about the highlights. If you need to balance channels a bit there use the tone eq in those regions and tweak by blending in that color channel…ie if blue skies are clipped try to bring it back that way and then balance the whole sky.
If you watch Boris edit you will notice that he does not mess with filmic hardly at all and does a large part of the job with the TE and rgb colorbalance instances…
Maybe throw your flower image over to the playraw forum and see what comes back…then compare it to your approach and see what differs…
Just some random thoughts… You can also try your images with the base curve or tone curves. The pipeline if more friendly to the basecurve now…what ever works…many images can be edited without filmic…
Now the extreme highlight saturation slider becomes a nice tool to tweak this. I suspect actually that the rgb colorbalance preset might actually not be the best for the new filmic and it might need toned down…also the preservation modes seem more consistent now but it could be me thinking that…the looks could vary widely before but I don’t notice such a wide range of results with the different modes now…I made a couple of color match icc profiles (jpg raw pair) and I use this with autoexposure as of late as I find it a good combination and filmic. I add lens correction and NR and that is about it…I tweak color and brightness with color calibration and use color balance where needed but my profiles do a really nice job with color so basically I just tweak the exposure if the auto is a bit high or low and I’ll do a local edit or two with the TE and that covers most of the images I process at this point in time unless I need to do some damage control…
Well, @Newerth did say he had pushed that image to extremes to show the issue…
On a second look, I’m not sure the “chromatic abberation” is not just a tiny bit of subject movement (looking at the hairs on the bud just below the top leaf, wind perhaps?). And then it’s not surprising the chromatic abberation module needs to be pushed to extremes…
Yes, that’s what I did with my summer photos recently. I kept Filmic RGB on it’s defaults most of the time. And to my surprise – it worked. Better than what I remember from the autumn set. Just sometimes it needed some tweaks as the colors were getting lost on better illuminated surfaces.
There’s indeed a lot to be learnt from Boris’ videos.
The exposure time was 1/3200 s. The lens really sucks in terms of CA. It’s hard to compensate for it. But then – maybe I’m just pixel peeping too much.
This looks like it doesn’t have Color Balance RGB’s “Add basic colorfulness” preset applied.
The Filmic + Color Balance result looks like it has the most color in the midtones and highlights in both portraits. In the first portrait look at the left cheek and in the second its just the whole face.
For the synthetic tests, the negative values to zero, I don’t see a huge difference, but in +1 to +3 for sigmoid, the transition from the outer edges (saturated color) towards the middle (white) looks pretty harsh. I’d be its hard to control that color when you’re somewhere in that transition zone.
From what I could see last night you greatly exaggerated it by maxing the settings and you can start to affect the overall color so you then even need to mask some times…if you have not seen rawfiners video on the workflow for difficult CA you should give it a look. He is the module author and does an excellent demonstration and some good examples…
That was much of the problem from a quick run through of his edit…the CA/artifacts were actually boosted by the extreme CA module settings and then chroma and saturation were cranked up in color balance which further amplified it…
I wonder if this will need to be tweaked with the new treatment when using filmic v6. Since it is not desaturating to the same extent I wonder if the preset will not produce the results and might even be too strong…
I guess I will have to look and see…
It does what it’s told, if what @priort shows is your setting. By increasing latitude to nearly 100%, you are voiding the roll-off in shoulder and toes. And then bye bye smoothness.
Drive your car very fast into a wall, it will kill you. Does the car behave wrong ?
Filmic is a 1D operator, it cannot actively create edge artifacts like that because you need a 2D filter to create edge effects. At most, it will preserve edge artifacts that already existed.
When I went module by module there was a pretty dramatic artifact created by this
Then strong increases in chroma and saturation further pushed that …
Then the chroma pres modes impacted the artifact. In my hands for example the luma pres mode gave I think the most CA at default on that particular part of the image but it was faint and no where near what was shown by the OP but even that version was easily corrected by the default settings of the CA module and using a normal curve and no big increases in rgb color balance as were added… I think it was a confluence of things
Those concerned about the attempts at constructive criticisms of some of filmics behaviour should have a look at how aurelien, completely unprovoked, behaves towards other contributors.
Like my teacher used to say, it takes two to tango. If you feel like that’s what he is doing you can raise your concerns, but there’s no need to be nasty or for verbal escalation. You won’t be more right, but you can be more wrong.
For those looking for samples should have a look up thread. Darktable’s Filmic RGB defaults render this desaturated - #8 by Newerth
Here is where we need you to be specific. What am I looking at? I’m not on my computer, so I can’t check the xmp file, but it seems like the second image has a bit higher exposure (which I find better), but it lacks a bit of contrast in the highlights. I may be wrong, but it seems like the white slider of the filmic module has been moved too far to the right. Aurelien has explained this many times, and its only logical. SDR screens’ dynamic range is smaller than most cameras today, so we need to fit that data into our screen somehow. This is where filmic comes in. Since there is a rather limited space above mid gray to fit all the highlights, if you try to squeeze many EVs in that space, contrast will of course decrease. In order to deal with that lack of contrast (assuming your filmic settings are how you want them), you need to dodge and burn to increase contrast where you need it (tone eq and/or masked exposure). Additionally you can use diffuse or sharpen with the local contrast preset. Color balance RGB will help you add or remove saturation to your image as needed, further increasing contrast. I haven’t tried filmic v6 but it seems like the results are much better in terms of saturation.
There are also lots of side by sides in the Sigmoid thread see this post for instance. Note that the sigmoid RGB ratio looks very much off as well. New Sigmoid Scene to Display mapping - #545 by jandren 2
Again, couldn’t check the xmp, but I suspect a bit of the same thing here.
Most files will show it but portraits will reveal it more clearly. If people don’t see it from these samples and can’t recognize it in other files I don’t know what to say.
This is where it gets tricky. You haven’t told us specifically what the problem is, but you seem to imply that there is one, and it should be obvious to everyone. Since there are so many elements of a picture we can focus our attention to, and we are not in your head, it’s highly unlikely that we all will see things the way you do right away without prior explanation. If you want better feedback, you might want to be more concrete.
It’s not as simple as desaturated on straightforwardly tinted. @jandren s synthetic samples probably reveal something for those that don’t see it in photos.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be looking at in the synthetic sweeps. I can see a more pronounced transition close to the edges in the sigmoid ones, but I don’t understand why that would be desirable.
I’m surprised so little difference can be seen in the synthetic midtones because in photos the effect appears to be very prominent there. It could be one of the many visual pitfalls I guess, the actual issue could lie elsewhere.
Again, be precise. What are the “many visual pitfalls” you are talking about? I thought we were talking about a pastelly look, but now it seems like there are other issues. Can you point them out and give examples? I’m not trying to be an asshole, just to understand what you mean.
Have you used v6 yet?
Only very briefly. Opened a bunch of recent files of mine but the pastel look was immediately noticeable compared to RT despite colorfulness preset being used.
The compression of the highlights would still happen no matter the version. The more you compress them, the more contrast will decrease. There is only so much room between middle grey and your screen’s peak brightness. It seems to handle colors in a nicer way, though.
Extreme colours like orange warning signs at road works turned toward red with the latter preset.
The basic colorfulness preset does a couple things, it increases chroma (aka saturation in other programs), but it also increases perceptual saturation (I believe that’s what it’s called) for shadows and midtones, and decreases it for highlights. What does that mean? Shadows and midtones will get more colorful while becoming darker, and highlights will become less colorful while becoming lighter, similar to a painter’s pigments. Aurelien has also talked about this in depth in his videos.
I’ve been emphasizing that my comments are not about “punch” or straight forward desaturation. For many years my photos were desaturated compared to the scene now I’m inching closer to realism from the flat side.
I didn’t understand this last bit.
Some good points and we now need to be clear are we talking about v5 or v6 behaviour. I suspect maybe the title of this thread is no longer even valid given the new approach and the only think might be that we now instead of adding saturation may even need to tone it down at times with the extreme luminance slider. Also the color balance preset might need to be toned down or tweak to fit this new output that comes from v6 by default… I think your best points are that clarity and specific examples are great discussion points but not emotion or vitriol …
Of course. V6 behaves differently and presets will likely need to be tweaked. However, if you understand how the modules work you can easily adjust the parameters you need on the fly. We’re just talking about three things (at least I was): compression of the highlights, local contrast, and saturation vs chroma. It’s not always fun, but here is where RTFM works wonders. I know I’ve read the sections on filmic and color balance RGB more than a few times.