Hi all;
I just installed Fedora 32 on my laptop, installed Darktable 3.2 and the filmic-rgb module no longer has the set of presets, it simply has a ‘stor new fvorite’ option and a favorite checkbox.
Can I get them back, re-create them somehow?
Thanks in advance
So those presets were intentionally removed, as they fiddle around with the mid-grey settings in filmic, and can result in confusion.
To make it simpler, Filmic now fixes the mid-grey point to 18.45%, and you are expected to use the exposure module to adjust the levels of the image coming into filmic so that mid grey from your scene is mapped into the 18.45% level. To help with this, when you select a scene-referred workflow, darktable will automatically activate the exposure module and add a 0.5 EV boost, and also takes into account any exposure compensation you applied in-camera to avoid clipped highlights/noisy shadows). This fit well with many cameras, but feel free to override it with an auto-apply setting in the filmic module if you find yourself constantly having to adjust it (eg. for my Sony A7R4, I find +1EV tends to work better on most of my images).
Filmic will then set your white/black points to roughly -8EV → 4EV (depends on how much exposure compensation was applied in camera), to give you a default of around 12 EV input dynamic range. Before you used to use a preset if you wanted to tweak this, now you can just use the dynamic range scaling slide to increase or decrease the input DR, and it will adjust the white and black points according, just like the presets used to do.
Or, of course, you can also explicitly set the white and black points yourself, possibly with the aid of the eye droppers.
By trying to pin down the filmic settings in this way, the goal is to make the workflow easier to manage. Once you have got the main parameters set up, you can then refine things in the highlight reconstruct and look tabs, or if you want to tweak the tone levels in a specific image, you can switch on tone equaliser and make some further adjustments there to shadows, highlights, etc…
So, this seems to be the new approach. I’ve tried it on a number of images already, and it seems to work quite well to streamline the filmic workflow.