Experiments with a scene-referred local contrast module - proof of concept

[s7habo (Boris Hajdukovic)]

Indeed.

Sorry for cluttering up the thread with examples, but they say more than words. Some of you will surely remember this one:

Trying to figure out RGB (filmic) workflow

Hi everyone, I have watched a bunch of videos and read a bunch of stuff, but I still can’t seem to get decent results with filmic. I’m don’t have much experience with Darktable but I have watched about 14 hours of videos and played with this file for a couple of weeks with little success. Using Filmic I can’t seem to pull the detail out of the snow while brightening up the person in this photo. I was actually able to do a decent job using the pre-rgb workflow but I’d like to figure out filmic.…

We had countless discussions in that thread about how to increase local contrast in snow. It wasn’t impossible, but now - take a look at the history log to see what was necessary to process this photo:

If one of these two versions of local contrast modules makes it into the master, then for me, the circle is complete. The problems with missing local contrast in highlights are off the table.