Not necessarily - in many cases, the tone curve is done on a per-channel basis, which means that the chrominance can shift in addition to the luminance. Filmic Tonemapping with Piecewise Power Curves – Filmic Worlds is a pretty good article on the subject. You’ll notice that it’s pretty heavy with implementation examples, as Hable was working for a gaming company at the time and his articles were pretty heavily focused towards game developers.
The majority of people feel that this makes the image more pleasing to the eye (most likely because we’ve been conditioned by years of media to respond positively to a film-like tone curve), however such an approach can sometimes negatively impact the chrominance of the wrong thing - for example, there are lots of complaints that Sony’s built-in tone curve of their cameras has negative impacts on the chrominance of non-Caucasian skin tones.
There are very good arguments that in most cases, this operation should be one of the last ones performed. I kind of agree with this, see my previous comments about using dt 2.7’s module reordering to put basecurve at the very end of the pipeline.
I was reminded of this thread recently in another thread. I remember downloading this image and being unable to produce a satisfactory result in DT. Perhaps it’s my skill and/or familiarity with DT, but I am a RT user now and I think I have coaxed a natural rendering of the colors from the raw using the “dynamic range compression” module.
Clearly the D7100 is as good as it’s reputation and the dynamic range is just waiting to be brought out. Perhaps the DR could be increased by lowering the iso at the cost of aperture or shutter speed.
Think this has to be reconsidered with the new filmic module in darktable 3.0. It handles most of my lightness issues and I don’t use the shadows and highlights module anymore.
A good result, but I think it is just a tiny bit milky. If you scroll up a long way in this thread, you will find a result posted by @Gaito using his preset invoking the DT tone mapping tool twice. The result is impressive and in my opinion even better than the filmic 3.0 result shown here.
I have downloaded the preset and used it many times since. Powerful and easy to use…
What do you mean? Do you have your own version of filmic (if yes, how can I get a ready to install windows version) or is your version a part of filmic 3.0?
I agree, but it seems that it’s more prone to produce halos, and I’d risk saying, strong ones.
In your image, there are some.
In this one from mine also:
Before:
I’m pretty sure it won’t mess with anything else. If you’re using Windows, the .zip file might be the most non-intrusive thing to use; download it, unzip it into a directory somewhere, and run it from there.
There’s some setup you might have to do; don’t hesitate to post questions here, or make a new thread…
Your right about the halos that is a known problem with tone mapping:
I use the preset in “extreme” situations (very dark shadows and very bright highlights) and you can lower the effect easily if needed. It’s a nice extra tool in the tool-box.
I see your point. But we have to use the tools available even if they are not without flaws. I prefer the RT Dynamic Range Compression tool to the DT Tone mapping.
Is there a chance that DRC will become available in DT?
Thank you for your post. It’s interesting to follow your experiments using the new filmic tool.
I have not yet implemented DT 3.0 but I have been watching @anon41087856 excellent videos for several hours. I seems that I didn’t understand the purpose of filmic from the outset. I thought it was a tool to rescue very demanding photos with almost blown out highlights and deep, almost black shadows. Now I understand that the filmic tool is meant to replace the base curve tool providing better color handling resulting in better images.
Regarding the two photos in question: I shot them knowing that they would need editing because the resulting images default would have a higher contrast than my eyes registered. My aim was to edit the photos resulting in images as I saw the scenes. In my opinion your editing is impressive but has evened out the contrast too much especially in the first photo. That should be easy to fix if you agree……
No problem . I tried to develop the image with regard to the persons, thinking that these are most important. The view came only second. Making the room & people relative darker, would make the task even easier.