Filmic latitude and the quick access panel

With 3.6 I have completely got rid of my Favourites module group by customising the quick access panel. The one thing that frustrates me is alltough I can adjust the latitude from the pnel, the graph isn’t displayed, so I am making a blind adjustment. Therefore I always have to go to the full module.
Is it possible to display the graph in the quick access panel (and I’m just overlooking how) or not?

Currently only some widgets may be added to this panel (check boxes, sliders, comboboxes) – more complex widgets such as curves are not supported.

https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/3.6/en/darkroom/organization/quick-access-panel/

Just wait - it’s coming in 3.8:

Screenshot_2021-07-11_16-31-47

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Good old Santa Claus.

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Just look at the histogram!

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Better yet: Let the waveform view be your guide.

(I saw some post on this site about the waveform, read up a bit, and have found it so much better than a histogram.)

It basically maps your image left to right and shows you the channels. You can see roughly where things might be clipping or falling off into darkness.

Sometimes you’re fine with letting some highlights blow out (such as very high intensity lights in the background —perhaps blended a bit with filmic rgb’s highlight recovery — or lots of pinpoint reflections on something with lots of tiny shiy facets). With a histogram, you’ll see a bunch of stuff clipping somewhere and may underexpose to try to pull back blown highlights that don’t matter. On a waveform, you can make sure what you care about is properly exposed.

Additionally, you can see color casts in your image when the channels aren’t in alignment in the waveform. This is especially true for things that should be near pure white or black or some shade of neutral grey. You can’t do this with a histogram.

Anyway, I find the waveform super useful for general purpose editing and the vectorscope great for color tuning. I try to avoid the traditional histogram.

The manual covers it well:
https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/3.6/en/module-reference/utility-modules/shared/histogram/

And there’s an oldie but goodie post from 2013 that’s still relevant @

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Also, probably worth mentioning: filmic rgb in darktable 3.6 tries really hard to not get into the orangered warning colors on the graph with the new (default) “safe” setting for the extremities.

https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/3.6/en/module-reference/processing-modules/filmic-rgb/#options

contrast in highlights

This control selects the desired curvature at the highlights end of the filmic rgb spline curve. The default setting (safe) is guaranteed not to over- or under-shoot but has quite muted contrast near white. Selecting hard places a tighter constraint on the slope of the spline, which makes the curve sharper and hence introduces more tonal compression in the highlights. Selecting soft loosens this constraint, resulting in a gentler curve with less tonal compression in the highlights.

contrast in shadows

This control selects the desired curvature at the shadows end of the filmic rgb spline curve. The default setting (safe) is guaranteed not to over- or under-shoot but has quite muted contrast near black. Selecting hard places a tighter constraint on the slope of the spline, which makes the curve sharper and hence introduces more tonal compression in the shadows. Selecting soft loosens this constraint, resulting in a gentler curve with less tonal compression in the shadows.

So, unless you change the settings in filmic rgb, it’s now much "safe"er to push a the adjustments by quite a lot. And you could play with contrast on the highlights and shadows in other modules (local contrast, tone equalizer, color balance rgb, or even many modules with a mask).

Which means keeping an eye on the waveform is fine enough in most cases.

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This web page don’t show the sample images of histograms and waveforms. Maybe some developer with access to the web administration know how to fix it.

<figure markdown="span" role="group">
![The gradient test image](grey.png)
<figcaption>*Figure 1:* the gradient test image – follow the link, download and play with it in darktable</figcaption>
</figure>

Looks like a problem with markdown (either translation into html or source markup)

Would you mind raising an issue on github please.

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Done:

Figures not showing in archived(?) blog pages

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