Thanks for this explanation. After reading stuff in these pages, I would fairly randomly switch to v5 and/or switch those chrominance options and most of the time not much significant happened. Then there’s Sigmoid as well. I’m not able to hold all the combos in my head and lack the ability to comprehend it from first principles. I sort of thought I understood (vaguely but enough) what was going on at some point in the past, then I no longer did.
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it doesn’t make sense to use the tonemapper to do stuff, that can be done better with toneequalizer or colorbalancergb.
Each version of filmic and also sigmoid or basecurve are having their strength and weaknesses, that might occur in some edge cases. But most is a matter of taste 
So better find a configuration that is ‚good enough‘ to be just activated by default.
So first do whatever is possible with the modules intended to edit tonal range and colors. Then you just need to tweak the tonemapper in a few cases.
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Tony v5 has a couple of distinct differences…one is in the gamut mapping… v6 introduced some that can produce salmon like colours at times in sunset etc and v5 can often avoid that. Also if you use v5 you will see that second curve in the display the width of which is set by the latitude… You can play with that… but it loosely defines the range that the midtone sat slider will impact …Try just for fun a v5 filmic added to one of your images set color pres to none. and set latitude to 50% too big can leave too little room for shadow and highlight fall off… now set your white and black and then play with the saturation slider and also you can shift it towards shadows or towards highlight’s. this will basically show you one of the main ways that you would see v5 to be different… you can then take a snapshot or several and then revert to v6 defaults and compare…
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Thanks for this Todd. I remember using the latitude slider in the past.
Ya and just to be clear my comments are by no means a recipe either just something that would more clearly show the sort of adjustments that you could make and the look in v5 rather than just flipping the color science toggle… 
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Hi there,
v7 is great. But, which colorbalance preset to use? As in v6, “vibrant” because of highlightdesaturaion there or “legacy/standard” like in v5? Quite unsure what preset is best.
Thanks…
The one that looks good to you. I’m sure it varies from picture to picture.
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The sliders in colorbalancergb are intentional
Presets aren’t related to filmic settings.
For my understanding (I read it somewhere(in this forum?)), v6 doesn’t desaturate in highlights, v5 does.
Therefore, v6 introduced “vibrant” in colorbalanceRGB, which has -25 saturation in highlights.
I know, just presets, but a good starting point…
There is no desaturation curve in filmic v7 as in v5, I guess v7 does no desaturation, equal to v6, so “vibrant” is a neat starting point.
If you try the different v6 modes, you’ll see that they produce more or less saturated highlights.
There is no way to produce a pure, fully saturated colour brighter than a certain level. During tone mapping and mapping to the output gamut (e.g., sRGB), at least one of saturation and brightness has to be reduced for bright, saturated colours.
In v5 and before, desaturation was explicit; in v6, it is not (but still happens to a certain degree, no and luminanceY causing the strongest desaturation). v6, especially in maxRGB mode, will try to reduce the brightness to keep the colour, which has been known to produce artefacts.
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The reason I like v5 is that you can desaturate or punch up the image base with quite a wide range of options and then use CB to tweak that… using just the mid tone slide you can essential take the image all the way down to monochrome and up to vibrant ++… Watch the saturation curve… this sort of control is much more subdued and works differently in v6 and v7
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In Filmic v7, it ditches the chrominance selector in favor of a “highlights saturation mix” in the “look” tab, which defaults to 0 and has a minimum of -50% and maximum of +50%. You can overdrive it (similar to many other sliders in darktable) by right-clicking and typing a new value, such as “100” for 100%, and hitting enter. It lets you go up to 200% or down to -200% (if you really want to go to extremes… but I wouldn’t recommend either extreme).
Using that play raw picture, I cropped to the highlights to show how darktable from master with filmic v7 handles.
Default:
+50%:
+100%:
+100%, with highlight recovery (which is needed here), with gray <-> colorful details turned down to 0% … so there’s a noticeable boost in color, but the highlights aren’t blaring:
Depending on what you’re going for, you probably still want “color balance rgb” in the mix, but this shows that you can tune filmic a little better with the new look slider.
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One nuance… as I noted or at least that was AP’s comments that -50 to 50 was considered representative of the swing from no preservation to maxRGB or similar and then it says beyond is a linear interpolation… does that mean a simple scaling or multiplier of the 100% max RGB (50%) and what would negative numbers below no preservation reflect??..
Here’s -50%:
And here’s -100% (set manually with a right-click and typing “-100”, then enter):
(These have had nothing else done to them. Normally, you’d also want to adjust the white/black relative exposure, and lots of other things. I’ve been keeping it default just to show how Filmic v7 handles the image.)
Speaking of crop, here’s the default XMP with just the crop (it probably requires latest unreleased darktable):
DSCF2164_01.RAF.xmp (9.0 KB)
And, for a point of comparison, here’s Sigmoid with default settings:
Most of this is super subtle, but the highlight color does matter for images like this — and also for sunsets and for highlights (especially skin) in portraits.
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After playing around with filmic V7 I do feel the average or new user will find it a little bit easier to use since we no longer pick a preserve chrominance option, which most of us (at least me) never understood. I just experimented with which looked better. Now we are given a simple highlights saturation slider which we move to get the best look. Newbies like sliders and I expect this will make filmic less daunting.
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