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.
This is what an unprocessed raw file looks like:
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.