By “classic film” I have for my part, as an amateur in the field, not understood e.g. “Gone with the wind” or “Technicolor” or similar, but instead rendering with a tone curve with shoulders akin to the variable sensitivity (within differing exposure) of a silver based film emulsion, rather than a straight line (which suddenly passes a clipping point) as the sensor more or less follow when registering a scene. Which I have thought is a good idea since, that’s the basis for how we have been used to see images.
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You can change this behavior so that editing does not start with “filmic rgb” enabled by default:
Global preferences → Processing → auto-apply pixel workflow defaults → choose: none o display-referred.
It seems most of the developers do not agree with you.
Your options are:
- come up with something better, demonstrate it, and convince the developers;
- change your configuration, and when you see a PlayRaw, or someone asking for help, show people how your approach works, what output it produces;
- fork darktable, and publish + support your own version
- find another tool, one that works better for you.
You joined this forum in late October. Maybe spend a little time here, engage in polite conversation, and express your opinion while keeping in mind that the developers and users who like the scene-referred workflow see value in it, and have their reasons to do so.
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I’m absolutely certain that developers don’t agree with me, and that’s fine.
Now If we ask regular users, the responses might me different.
That makes sense, let’s hope for some more development in that area, including naming conventions.
I am clear on what you don’t want, ie no filmic as the default… What I am not so clear on is what you want… At this point its a bit like me being annoyed by the default font Microsoft chooses for word or the margins or whatever… They are not set in stone but they are a design decision I would guess about what is the best starting point…
Filmic supports a pixel processing pipeline created by those developing it designed to process the data in a linear scene-referred way. This was a direction of the software and the gateway for that pipeline to the display was filmic which evolved over time. If you were using DT for other reasons ie not this workflow but because you like the software then there is the option for a starting point via the basecurve and even some tools with darktable chart for example which can be used to come up with a starting style to match the jpg (I think this might be broken but it can be used in 3.6). Or like me you can set it to none and evaluate the image and decide how to edit it…
In this case the defaults are what they are to support the design philosophy of the software. And they are not set in stone. If people read the manual they can understand why this is and what the goal and implementation is and also what the options are so they are free to experiment. Just as is required with a number of the modules so as to find what settings give you the perceptual look that pleases you…
So after all that would you say the default should be none and if not what should it be in your mind rather that what it should not be…
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This reads like a troll post, @strumpfli and will be locked unless you start making some helpful statements or asking useful questions.
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You make very vague statements. What kind of further development is desired? How should a better naming look like? Please make suggestions on how you think something could be better.
If you don’t like darktable there is a simple solution: use another software.
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Great, yet another echo chamber with everyone going defensive on a slightest comment that’s not fully positive.
Not sure if I’m willing to continue when called a troll, so have a nice one and good luck.
You got the answers. Hardly an echo, just facts.
There was zero positive in your comments and the tone was whiney.
Please don’t.
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These forums require a lot a care and thought when commenting so that things are not taken out of context… and the content might also have cross over to others on the thread or other threads themselves
My comments back to you were hopefully trying to suggest why things were as they were and tease out from you what your suggestion might be given the context provided.
Hopefully not echoing but engaging or trying to… if I failed sorry. I reached the limits of my abilities…
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It’s not film simulation, it’s a tone mapper to get all the dynamic range of your shot in the output . A crucial part of any raw developing stage.
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I visit the forum regularly. I don’t see many topics at all like this.
I see topics complaining about filmic all the time. But as someone pointed out, prior to sigmoid being merged, there wasn’t any real viable alternative other than possibly basecurve moved to the end of the pipeline which resolves most of the issues it has but still leaves quite a few flaws.
Now that sigmoid is in, it would be pretty easy to make an argument for it to be the new user default.
That said, attacking filmic because of extremely inaccurate wording in the manual that it is in any way like classic film is not an appropriate criticism, the only criticism there is how poorly worded the manual is in that regard.
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But that doesn’t matter since those doesn’t provide any code to make darktable better.
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I suspect it is language inherited from its origins… or main source of inspiration…
Huh?
From the manual page:
Remap the tonal range of an image by reproducing the tone and color response of classic film.
This module can be used either to expand or to contract the dynamic range of the scene to fit the dynamic range of the display. It protects colors and contrast in the mid-tones, recovers the shadows, and compresses bright highlights and dark shadows. Highlights will need extra care when details need to be preserved (e.g. clouds).
Seems pretty accurate to me, though improvements are always welcome via a pull request.
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Does not look accurate to me at all.
Classic film has three separate color layers, each of which has an independent nonlinear response to wavelengths that it is sensitive to.
Which is about as far away from filmic’s religious avoidance of per-channel behaviors as you can get. Norms, hue preservation - none of these concepts exist in classic color film.
No halation either. One could argue that this is a good thing unless you are desiring to emulate halation, but another thing that sets it far apart from classic film.
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Not worth my time personally. As you are quite aware, I have wasted more than enough of my time on darktable pull requests.
It’s also the responsibility of the module’s author to accurately describe how it works. I can tell you that “like classic film” is not remotely accurate, but filmic has thrashed around so many times (6 revisions with massive changes at this point) that describing it accurately is extremely difficult.