Based on my own editing, as well as on feedback from More punchy/contrasted look in AgX by default, I’m thinking about changing the defaults (that would come in the next major release, I think) to be close to what sigmoid provides.
I could go with the numbers I posted in that topic to match its defaults or the smooth preset, or a middle-ground. The primaries would still remain the same, based on Blender.
Please try the new ‘maybe’ presets (Blender-like primaries, no hue preservation, tone curve settings based on sigmoid|default or sigmoid|smooth) on many different images (harshly lit as well as low in contrast; rich, saturated colours as well as subdued colours, maybe taken on a foggy or on overcast day; night / dusk as well as daylight; natural / artificial light – whatever you can think of): agx_maybe-matched-to-sigmoid-default.dtpreset (1.2 KB) agx_maybe-matched-to-sigmoid-smooth.dtpreset (1.2 KB)
I would probably remove the ‘punchy’ preset, as these new ones are quite contrasty, but we can discuss that later.
I’ll provide a poll here on next weekend, once we have had time to experiment.
hue preservation
I would also like to ask about your opinion (and you can vote about that right now): since AgX has been introduced, I’ve seen quite a few sunset images that were too yellow for my taste (there is no hue preservation by default). Blender uses 60% of hue preservation (and I plan to update the ‘Blender-like’ presets like that, because if we promise we do what Blender does, we should). Should we enable some hue preservation by default? It’s adjustable in the ‘look’ section (but I’m considering moving it from to the ‘primaries’ tab, which would be renamed to ‘colors’, or maybe having it among the always-visible settings, like it is in sigmoid).
In case you have not tried hue preservation so far, please do it before voting.
default hue preservation
keep it disabled
set it to 50-60% (60 is Blender’s default)
0voters
I’m not offering an option of 100%, because that can lead to salmon sunsets.
My default preset for AgX starts with the smooth preset, but adds:
50% hue preservation, to give sunsets and fires a bit of heat,
increased contrast to 2.6, as the default is too flat in my opinion,
and pushes the look slope to 1.05, as AgX tends to expose highlights only to 240, which looks too dull in my opinion.
I tend to not like the look of the additional saturation controls in AgX, and prefer to use the “basic colorfulness” in Color Balance instead. For small contrast adjustments in the highlights and shadows, I like shoulder and toe power, but there are often situations where I’ll additionally adjust lift look lift and slope, if the powers aren’t powerful enough (am I doing this wrong?).
Oh, silly me, I was starting from the AgX defaults, with “smooth” primaries, instead of the “smooth” AgX preset. I’ll try using 2.8 as a default then. Thank you!
Yes, it will go there eventually. Just not quite quick enough for my taste .
It’s 2.8 in the scene-referred defaults, too. I now saw that the default for the slider was left at 2.4. I have already updated that on a branch, but that will have to wait until the next major release, 5.4.1 can only have more serious bugfixes (some minor changes for AgX, like not turning it on for all HDR images, only for raw files, tech. maintenance, and not hiding the base space if ‘disable adjustments’ is ticked).
Is this going to become like filmicRGB, with past color science settings selectable? Personally, I think people should just learn to use the settings in the ways that they prefer, and not change the default settings so often.
The algorithm does not change, there are no different versions or different colour science. It’s simply that both others and I have found that we pretty much always raise the default contrast, so I think it’d make sense to provide something that’s closer to what people in general prefer in the end, simply to have a ‘first impression’ that’s closer to the final edit. We’d probably still tune the curve, but it may be useful for culling etc.
People can still make their own presets (and, as you can see, some have already done that, and that’s great), but we could save them some work by providing better experience out of the box.
I was not aware of the Blender default to 60% for hue preservation. After using the module for a while, I found that most of the time I wanted some hue preservation. In most of my images I used 55%. Therefore I defaulted it to 55% in my preset for the module.
My main motivation for the default was to avoid having the Look section expanded taking space. I would also welcome moving that slider up outside the Look section.
speaking for myself I am tying to make my own presets to match my own camera or cameras. This is still a work in progress. I feel adding these new presets as options in the preset list is a good idea. Not yet sure how I will vote in your poll.
I tend to avoid the look section for corrections because these are applied after tone mapping. However, I have tweaked saturation and I can see that I might want to tweak hue preservation. I wonder if both of these sliders should be moved out of the look tab.
Yes I typically use hue preservation at 60%, and often increase contrast to 3.5+.
I also prefer the look section collapsed by default as I never use it, except for hue preservation. I personally would love to keep that slider and remove the rest!
I use one or two of them with every AgX edit. The lift slider can be a treat to just finish off the blacks and a little slope or saturation can be quite useful at times as well… So collapsed is fine but I wouldn’t remove them…move the hue slider too if people think so…
First, thanks for this great module! It took me a few photo sessions editing to get used to it, but I start to get it ^^. Since you ask for tone curve and hue preservation, I am sharing my feedback based on my real-world use-case rather than technical details:
Preserve Hue:
From what I see when developing images, with a bright blue sky, hue preservation at 50-60% is a must, while in most other types of photos it doesn’t have such a big impact, so I voted for the 50-60% preset.
Tone Curve:
Besides, as a non-technical person, I don’t see much difference between “blender-like” and “smooth” default presets, between default and unmodified base primaries, and I would suggest keeping just one set to not over-complicate stuff.
Lastly, when I edit my pictures, i tend to have a “default” preset that roughly gives an idea of the photo for culling and comparison, and then later i will edit more precisely the photos I chose for exporting or printing.
Currently I think the quality of editing is excellent in AgX and I really like the results I get vs filmoid and Filmic. But for my use, scene-referred is too close to “base”, as in my test session it will have very low contrast in the sky (white relative exposure of 6.5 often ends up around 4.5 and then i have to touch dynamic range scaling a lot) and I wish there was a more middle-ground preset I can apply when importing, before in my case going to “base” when i want to do the “real” editing later. It’s not a big deal as I can do my own default preset, but when starting to use AgX it’s really something that stood out for me as a first impression, so wanted to share it too.
I haven’t fully checked documentation yet so forgive me if some parts are inaccurate or i miseunderstood how the module works.
Concerning default primaries: I mostly like the colours blender-like gives but it tends to skew greens to yellow, which I don’t always like for photos of vegetation. I’d vote for smooth preset to be default as it feels more neutral to me.
I know this probably isn’t an AgX specific issue, but I thought I’d just check:
Would it make sense if the default for the auto tune levels picker was 98% of the cropped image rather than the original uncropped image?
I always want the black and white points to be set from the cropped image, so I always have to redraw the bounding box when using the auto tune levels picker.
I know I’m late to things, but also agree with the 50% hue preservation. I also think increasing default contrast to 3 would generally be good. Maybe not quite as much contrast as sigmoid but however it works out, is fine with me
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