Is there any rule when it is better/easier to use filmic and when sigmoid? Does it depend on lighting conditions, complexity of a photo or simply on personal preferencies?
What is your experience?
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I would say itās largely personal preference myself.
I find it easier and quicker to get results I like (in most cases) using sigmoid.
Filmic does preserve highlight colour and detail a lot more than sigmoid - which can be good or bad depending on the image.
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My personal preference is
- a filmic based workflow as default for all my images that are exposed to the right (no raw overexposures)
- the main reason is that Iām familiar/trained to work with it for a long time
- for me this workflow has finer options for color grading, finer control of contrasts - although this may be due to a lack of abilities on my side with Sigmoid
- downside: it takes a lot more time and modules to achieve a slightly better image
- I use Sigmoid for special images with blown highlights, overexposed RGB channels or extreme lighting like white/blue LED and for superbright yellows in pictures
- the Sigmoid workflow seems a lot faster, requires less modules to achieve a proper image
- if Iām in a hurry then I choose this workflow as well
I donāt know if you saw this reply by @s7habo to a similar question after his latest Editing With Darktable video:
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Why so? In my unscientific efforts I tend to see harsher contrast transitions with sigmoid, and filmic has the additional highlight recovery modes. But Iād be interested to learn from othersā experiences
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FWIW, I am using sigmoid almost exclusively now. It is not a one-stop-shop for various corrections (eg highlights) like filmic, but I fix those using other modules.
But it may be a personal preference as I passionately hate the ācolor scienceā part of filmic. I think it is too complex and its controls all interact, ie each affects so many things about the outcome that it takes a lot of fiddling to get good results.
Generally I want my darktable modules to be modular: to the extent possible, do one thing, and do it well. sigmoid is much better in that respect.
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Thanks. I think Iāve seen others argue before the latest version of sigmoid that they generally defaulted to filmic because they wanted to separate the tonal and hue parts of processing into two separate modules; filmic and color balance rgb
I think sigmoid works fine with color balance rgb. I use them together a lot.
It is just that much less (or zero) color balance rgb tweaking is required to get a pleasant āgenericā look with sigmoid. And of course the recent sigmoid with the primaries is just amazing.
My (methodological) problem with filmic rgb is that it looks like a very generic and versatile approach to mapping BW images, with color somehow tagged on as an afterthought with various hacks.
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filmic with default settings is more friendly for skin rendering, default sigmoid gives more color contrast.
If it comes to extreme red/yellow highlights sigmoid with primary settings is beneficial to get yellow/orange/red highlights instead of salmon highlights.
So itās mainly your preference
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Kind of an aside, but people always go on about salmon colour sunsets and whatnot but, to me at least, they kinda tend to beā¦ salmon coloured in real life. They just arenāt like 70s postcard orange, quite often, no?
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Image editing is about personal preferences: some like salmon sunsets because thatās reality, some likes colorful yellow/orange/redā¦
have a look at all this playeraw threads - that range of reality doesnāt exist 
just fundamentalist doesnāt accept different preferencesā¦
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I donāt feel there is a wrong or right answer to your question. I teach DT and I find it easier to teach the concepts of Sigmoid rather than the more complex UI of filmic. That doesnāt in itself make sigmoid better than filmic.
I find filmic gives dull colors straight out of the box and you need to then go to color balance rgb to bring back the levels of colors you want. That is not a problem so much as part of the complexity of using filmic. On the other hand sigmoid gives more colorful images straight out of the box. That makes sigmoid initially look better than filmic, but that is an unfair comparison because color balance rgb is an integral part of the filmic workflow.
So pick whichever one you prefer would be my opinion. Sometimes there are odd images that definitely work better in one or the other and in these cases we also have to compare filmic V5 and filmic V7 because they are like two different beasts.
For my two cents worth I use Sigmoid as my default because for many images I donāt even really need to touch it and the colors look good out of the box. But I have no need to knock filmic or any of those people that use it as the default. Simoid has also improved a lot with the addition of the primary sliders. These can be very useful when photographing under strong colored stage lighting.
Thanks. Donāt really get the last bit but no matter. Yeah, not saying any way is right, but that thereās a lot of shock-horror expressed that a camera/software combo should produce such an apparent āinsult to aestheticsā. Reminds me of an old Eddie Izzard standup routine where he says people always complain about their passport photos looking uglyā¦
Nice. Where do you do this? And how do you find people who want to learn it? My experience of the various online and offline camera clubs/meetups/forums, bar this one, is that people think youāre from planet zog if you donāt use Adobe, or maybe Capture One.
My 2c hereā¦
The thing I like about sigmoidās highlight handling as that it (usually, at least with my style of PP) is that it smoothly rolls off to white, which is often a look I like.
Filmic hangs on to much more colour and detail, to the last bit so as to speak, which I donāt really want usually.
It may be more to do with my shooting style - but usually I donāt want to hang on to every last bit of detail in the highlights. I find it difficult to smoothly āroll offā towards white with filmic.
The other thing for me is the way sigmoid renders contrast and colour. If I increase the contrast slider in sigmoid (in per channel mode - always for me), both the contrast and the chroma increase together in what seems like a very natural way. Not saying it is, just my personal opinion.
Again, itās fairly easy to blow highlights and shadows, but I use tone EQ to pull stuff back where necessary which works very well.
But Iām not trying to convince anyone! I respect filmic a lot - itās just that like @Terry I (usually) find sigmoid easier and more in line with the results I like. At the momentā¦
Sigmoid also seems handy for newcomers to dt as with the sigmoid option enabled in preferences the initial darkroom view is kind of closer to what people expect.
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Filmic just wrecks highlights and color, pretty much useless for using on night images with lights and color.
So just use sigmoid.
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Thatās putting it a little strongly, IMO, but yes, blown-out lights as in night photography are one of the cases where Iāve struggled with filmic.
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This is surprising to me. In play raws etc. odd mute pinkish skin rendering is often a giveway that filmic has been used. Filmic seems to do better than Sigmoid at extreme highlight detail though. I donāt think skin is unfixable with filmic itās just that many people fail to dial it in.
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You are probably right here. Kudos to Capture One that they are now seen as a genuine alternative to Adobe.
I teach camera classes through community education and this gives me the opportunity to promote DT in a face to face setting. However, maybe half of my DT students have done my camera class so my blurb describing DT must be effective enough and I guess some word of mouth promotion by my students to get the rest of the students enrolled.
Interestingly, in November I failed to attract enough students for my Adobe class to run, but had enough for DT to run.
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Have you changed the shoulders in filmicā¦ safe gives a pretty soft roll-off and there is soft or the default hard that is a sharper transitionā¦ with the new v7 its pretty easy to pick one of these and desaturate that as well if neededā¦ Filmic with each iteration changed partly to try and address complaints and also as part of a color exerciseā¦ I think this made it difficult for the average user. If I recall filmic at one time had a default contrast of 1.2 or 1.3 where as now it is 1 so this might be part of the contrast gap out of the gate that you can see with filmic and sigmoid. Back then you didnāt have the safe option for the roll-off so contrast was more harsh and thus it got backed off ā¦ For me I can pretty much get the sigmoid look by using v5 with no preservation safe roll-off and adding more contrast, add/edit some mid-tone saturation and I can dial this in with the latitude and highlight shiftā¦ And there is no gamut funny business I can tweak that in primaries if necessaryā¦So I have never really used v6 or v7. I prefer the control of this approach but I also see that in many cases if you use sigmoid it does give a very pleasing overall result to the eye and it really shines in the weird/extreme lighting situationsā¦
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