The first thing in my approach is: What do I want to achieve ? What is my goal ? Where is my “subject” ? For me this picture contains roughly 2 main subjects: The sky and the mountains.
For me the mountains are more interesting, as the sky is heavily blown out and lost most of its detail. So, the mountains would be my subject and thus determine my “middle grey”. I would lift up exposure until this subject is clearly visible. (I never measure middle grey as you do in the video.) Next I would add some contrast and maybe saturation. And that’s it.
I watched your video and it is not clear for me where your goal is. Do you want to make the landscape visible, or is your interest in showing the structure of the clouds ? Are there any other parts of the image you want to make visible or lead the viewers eye to ?
Getting to this point is usually a matter of a couple of minutes’ work for me. I use the ISO12646 color assessment mode (bulb icon at the bottom of the screen or Ctrl+B) to set mid-grey, then filmic (still in color assessment mode), working through the tabs from left to right. Then I add some local contrast and play around with saturation until I’m happy.
Perhaps I am just lucky but I found that after increasing exposure by 0.5 to 1 stop, the default filmic delivers a pretty good starting point, remarkably close to OOC jpeg for a couple of different cameras. (better with preserve chrominence set to no IME). I tend to leave it alone unless it is an extreme photo and use tone equaliser to adjust shadows, highlights etc.
My only difficulty is that sometimes skies are too desaturated. If you increase the latitude to increase the saturation of the highlights then the curve starts to reverse. Perhaps this is sorted in later versions.
Perhaps that means you have set the white point too low, in effect over-exposing the blue sky. As highlights cannot be coloured (*), there’s a progressive desaturation towards the highlight end of the histogram.
*: See the articles by Aurélien Pierre for the theoretical background
First of all, thank you for taking the trouble to clarify your comments regarding the use of filmic with an example in a video. So one can understand your approach and emerging concerns well.
It depends on the photo. In this article I have talked about it and shown a few examples:
I think that you always have a subject in the photo, otherwise you will not make that photo. But this does not mean that you have to have this subject in the “middle gray”. This is a technical and very rigid term and serves only as a rough orientation. What is “well lit” is subjective and depends on many factors.
In this example, the warning in the foreground on the ground between the rails and the part of the street in background, illuminated by the evening sun were important for me because they indicate a strong contrast between the danger in the time of the pandemic and the nice inviting weather for sightseeing:
Here it is not a middle gray that is important, but the relationship between these two elements, which must be placed in such a way that both are easily recognizable, but at the same time, without the “reality” of the scene suffering much.
What is necessary for brightness value, you can recognize very well with your own eyes, without relying too much on any correct “measured values” in the processing.
If the dynamic range requires it, of course! The main thing here is to adjust the brightness locally, which should make the main subject stand out better.
If your subject is well lit, like in the studio, you can finish the processing with filmic. But this is rarely the case when you shoot outside. You don’t always have ideal lighting situations.
Accordingly - as far as brightness is concerned - it doesn’t make much sense to always see the entire photo, but rather to see the elements in the image that play the role.
The process with filmic is very similar to the process when you previously switched off the base curve and have more control over the processing. The advantage of filmic is that in addition to the possibility of being able to deal with dynamic range very flexibly, by imitating the analog film, you already have a solid basis for further processing of the photo.
And depending on this dynamic range, you can immediately achieve good results with filmic, or you can use it as a tone mapper and continue your work with other modules.
_MG_0653.CR2.xmp (22.2 KB)
I spent most of the time in recovering highlights (which are blown, unfortunately) doging and burning, enhancing contrast, masking, color grading etc, but I touched exposure only once.
What I’m about to describe isn’t darktable per se, apologies to all who are focusing on its knobs and dials. But, after my own wrangling with parametric curves such as filmic, I’ve come to the conclusion that sometimes, you just have to go rouge…
I downloaded the raw and tried both my four-parameter filmic and the two-parameter doublelogistic, but I couldn’t pay homage to both the dark and light regions with either. So, I reverted to a two-step process: 1) a loggamma curve to spread the data out, followed by 2) a control-point curve to shape the tone transitions to my whims. Here’s a screenshot showing the image at the control-curve tool:
Yes, that’s the way you could see it. The play of light on the left slope of the mountains combined with the swiveling path of the stream that draws its course from the shining mountain behind is what makes the scene special. The dramatic clouds enhance that even more:
@Mister_Teatime I have another suggestion. Watch @s7habo’s Editing Moments video series. Don’t watch to just see how he transforms an image, but watch to see how he uses the tools and what he uses them for. There are a lot of videos that are about this is what the tool does and this is how it works. Editing Moments is about how to use those tools to effect a part of an image and how to stack those tools and edits together to achieve a finished edit.
I really like your clouds, so I’m going to peek at the xmp. I’m betting it has something to do with channel mixer (color calibration) and an overlay blending mode , plus a few other tweaks
what? I’m pretty sure I did not compress the history stack…
Also: Feel free to edit it, but the point of this was only partially about the result but mostly about how to get there quicker, how to know where to go in the first place, and how that could be accelerated. Which is why I felt that it wasn’t quite a play RAW kind of post.
That is one big reason I made this video in the first place: What kind of magic does everybody use to get the exposure setting right the first time, before even having filmic set up, accurately enough that they never need to touch it again?
I keep being told that that is “how you do it”. I conclude that there must be a way, too, but I’ve no idea how. I think it means that either you have edited so many photos with a very consistent look that you can just eyeball it and be always right, or you are using other tools to change the brightness of the photo with other tools, independent of the exposure module. Which, by the way, is a feature I’d love to see in filmic but keep being told that the exposure module and only the exposure module must be able to change affect middle grey …
Yes, I agree on that. I did not express that too clearly in the video. The question was not really “what is my subject?” but “which criterion should I use to set exposure, and how would I know if I’ve set it right?”. Which I find hard to answer, particularly if changing exposure means that filmic needs to be readjusted.
I didn’t touch the exposure, I just left it where it was. In my mind, this is a pretty decent starting point for a filmic based edit.
My base set of modules so far, for getting an image that is ready for some artistic edits is:
white balance, exposure, filmic, local contrast.
I think the problem with this image is that your subject matter is the mountains, and they fall in the shadow area, and you’ve clipped the sky pretty badly.
I first set the mid-tone where I want them, on in lieu of mid-tones, I use exposure to set some tone where I expect them to fall in the brightness range of the image. I think part of the problem in this photo is that the mountains are in shadow and you want them to be brighter, but you’ve clipped your highlights so trying to make the mountains brighter throws the clouds way out of range.
I try to "tame the histogram,’ that usually amounts to just getting the dynamic range of the images to fit the dynamic range of the output (Adobe RGB or sRGB).
I always try to have a subject, yes. And if its going to be a great photo, that subject should be the brightest thing in the frame (not middle gray). Being the brightest thing in the frame will draw the eye straight to it.
If I put a dropper on the brightest part of the mountains, it’s something around L 35-40 in LAB. You’re just approaching mid-tones in that case.
I’m usually happy with my mid-tones after adjusting exposure. So I don’t generally alter the mid-tones of the whole photo. I do often do some local edits with a mask and tone equalizer or another instance of the exposure module, if the photo calls for it.
That is pretty much what I was trying to do. I don’t usually care much about middle grey, but about the things which I want to be discernible being discernible.
And after looking at the videos you linked to, it would seem that you don’t actually use filmic to tweak the image at all. In most cases, you seem to just leave it on (your) default, and exposure is also just used for a rough pre-adjustment step. The range of other modules is then used to get everything lit up as you like it.
So, do you simply use filmic like a fixed base curve, then?
Is the answer to my question about tweaking filmic settings “don’t tweak them, compensate with other tools”?
:
, plus a few other tweaks
