Filmulator "Nightly" Builds: Now for Windows and Linux

Haha! It was ever thus…

@quiteinterested

What application are you reading it with?

Filmulator is writing a floating point value and it’s being read fine by exiv2, but the tag is supposed to be rational and LibTiff can’t write them from what I can tell.

I’m going to try to make it use Exiv2 again, which darktable apparently does successfully, but the last time I did that it was crashing Photoshop. So I need someone with Photoshop to test that it works once I make a change.

I’m using Rawtherapee and a Windows-only application called FastStone Image Viewer. Unfortunately I don’t have access to Photoshop so I’m of no help in that regard.

If switching to darktable will solve the issue I’m happy to do that; I have no particular attachment to Rawtherapee after having become familiar with your software, and it is only for high ISO files requiring noise reduction that I use TIFF export.

Update 2021-01-31: v0.11.1rc6

  • TIFFs now have the correct format shutter speed metadata; I do need people with Photoshop to test that the TIFF output doesn’t cause crashes.
  • A backslash in a string broke one translation; I fixed that.
  • When you use a raw file as an argument to Filmulator, it imports it and now also directly loads it and goes to the Filmulate tab.

Update 2021-02-04: v0.11.1rc7

By request on Reddit I made it possible to override the “do not import in place from a directory containing DCIM because it can be a memory card” error.

Update 2021-02-12: v0.11.1rc8

@Luemmel may be happy to hear that I’ve implemented a white balance picker for Filmulator.

When you pick the white balance, it stores the settings per-camera for the editing session so you can easily apply it to other images. You can also store manually-set white balance values.

1 Like

Yes, that makes me happy :grinning:.
BTW: I can test a exiv2 implementation in Photoshop if it is still needed.

1 Like

Update 2021-02-14: v0.1.11rc9

The pre-Filmulation and post-Filmulation histograms now correspond only to the area of the crop (though Filmulation still runs on the full image to make make cropping more responsive).

I can’t do this nearly as simply for the raw histogram, though, because of the presence of distortion correction…

Additionally, you can now hit the Esc key to cancel the dropdown box for lens selection; this is nice if you search for a lens but can’t find it.

New white balance features are fantastic; thanks!

1 Like

Update 2021-04-07: v0.11.2rc1

I took a bit of a break, and now I’m back.

I added a Help button that causes applicable tooltips to show instantaneously instead of with a delay, which should help users explore the in-application documentation more easily.

Additionally, I enabled directory import to follow symlinks (and added a 20-deep recursion limit), as well as enabling it to open file symlinks (which is needed to work with git-annex.

Thanks for sharing all your hard work on this with us. I thought I would start to play around with Filmulator and I have one question is there a way to compare the original image with the state of the current edit…essentially a preview vs original toggle?? Thx

Not at the moment.

At some point I may add the ability to save multiple edits of the same file but I haven’t worked out a good UI for it.

Thx…Ya even a way to add a global opacity slider or something maybe not sure…it would just be nice to be able to toggle to the original to see visually where you have gone with the image…

Update 2021-06-24: v0.11.2rc2

Lotsa changes here:

Noise reduction is the big one. Turning on the switch reveals new controls.

Screenshot_20210624_000919

  • Noise Reduction itself additionally enables LMMSE demosaicing.
  • NR Strength controls nonlocal means demosaicing which does chroma and luma NR together.
  • NR Gradients is something you should increase if you get posterization. This is at the expense of making it slower.
  • Speckle NR is the impulse denoise from RawTherapee. Nonlocal means sometimes adds speckles, and this will help take those out.
  • Chroma NR is also from RawTherapee. Going too high causes some color shifts (not quite sure where they’re coming from) and a bit of smearing, but I usually find it’s not necessary.

The noise reduction settings are not saved between processing sessions, because they’re not finalized yet; I think there may yet be some more tweaking I can do. When I do rev up the database and have them save, then I’ll call that version 1.0.0.

Also, it is memory hungry. When doing noise reduction to 60 megapixel A7r4 files, memory usage balloons to over 19 gigabytes. Beware. I might be able to shrink this in the future though…

Other changes:

  • Black levels on Panasonic cameras is fixed…? Not 100% sure this is finalized, but it’s a big improvement.
  • When beginning cropping, if you’re fit zoomed, the view zooms out so all crop handles are visible.
  • The intro text when no image is selected now tells the user that you can zoom and pan around.
  • Sampling a custom white balance no longer automatically saves it.
  • If no matching lenses are found when searching for a lens, the user is prompted to download lens corrections.
  • Fixed a bug where switching images by keyboard would block rating changes.
  • Fixed a bug where tooltips would run off the bottom of the window and get cut off.
  • Make sliders on the Settings tab reset to their defaults instead of to what they were when the program was launched.
  • Made a Reset All button for settings to rescue the user from accidentally making it 400% scaled.
  • A tooltip for all continuous sliders now tells the user how to get to the precise input dial.
  • The tooltip on the Help button always shows up instantly even when not in Help mode.
5 Likes

Update 2021-06-27: v0.11.2rc3

I fixed a horrendous memory leak in noise reduction. A7r4 files now take 11 gigabytes peak in my testing.

I also reduced memory usage overall, with 8.8 gigs peak for A7r4 files when not using noise reduction.

3 Likes

Trying out the noise reduction features with some images from my Fuji X-T4. Just wanted to ask about the LMMSE demosaicing, are you aware of any issues with this with x-trans CFA’s?

Also a suggestion to be able to preview noise reduction settings on a selected rectangle in stead of the full image. And to be able to do some “before/after” flipping back and forth which is really helpful to judge the effects of noise reduction.

The sliders are also not quite so intuitive to use and the max value of the first slider leaves the image in a pretty unusuable smeared state. Why the need to pull it so far beyond realistically usable levels? Also the sliders could use some tooltips, and some reasonable default values based on the ISO of the image being edited.

In the discussion leading up to this build I kept reading that you didn’t want to use any kind of luminance noise reduction, only chroma. Yet the first slider is both luma+chroma. Did you change your mind?

Don’t get me wrong I really appreciate this new feature and your continued work on Filmulator. I really like it, even compared to Capture One which I also use.

1 Like

Thanks for the feedback, this is exactly what I was hoping for.

I should clarify the wording in the tooltips, LMMSE is only used on Bayer raws.

Previewing on a small region is going to be… challenging to implement, but I agree it’s probably necessary. I’ll probably need to make some sort of bypass to the Filmulation algorithm, which won’t work reasonably on small crops.

Because high values may be useful for extremely high ISO images like this one: Hockey game under lights: 20k ISO on m4/3

Everything has tooltips, it’s on the name of the tool so that the tooltips don’t bother you while you’re manipulating the slider. Try pressing the Help button in the top right to make tooltips appear instantly.

Instead of guessing at reasonable defaults, I might actually make Filmulator keep a moving average of your NR settings for each ISO for each camera… does that sound good?

I didn’t use RawTherapee’s luma noise reduction that was built into the same code as their chroma NR. The luma+chroma noise reduction currently in Filmulator is an independently developed nonlocal means implementation.

I was originally going to use nonlocal means for just luminance NR, but it proved better for very high ISO images to use both luminance and color from nonlocal means, then feed that output into the chroma NR from RawTherapee.

And every time I encounter software that doesn’t let me pull it far enough I think “why?!?!?” :).

Images are always different and you never know what someone is trying to achieve.

I (used to) use filmulator for mapping tiff files from scans that needed exposure fixing, and contain quite some DR. (high dynamic range negative scans that have all the signal ‘squished’ in 16bit tiff files). Filmulator was awesome in what it did out of the Box by just raising an exposure slider… But the noise and grain in old 1600 iso film negatives is nothing compared to iso 64000 iso modern digital files :).

Well I guess there are use cases for massive levels of noise reduction after all :slight_smile:

I suppose if we wanted to be really advanced the slider range should scale by ISO, so that it has “more range” for high ISO images and “less range” for smaller ISO values. But then again it might be overengineering. I’m just looking for a way to make these tools easier to use for the end user.

Something I’ve seen in luminar (or affinity, don’t know anymore) is an ‘extreme’ checkbox that ups the slider range.

Default it’s conservative, a click of the checkbox and you can go nuts if you think you need it.

You don’t need any iso scaling (which differs per camera, or files don’t have Metadata) and it’s easy to program.