I started this post in the ‘evaluate sigmoid’ thread, but figured it would be too much of a hijack, so I cut & pasted the rest in here.
This file is too contrasty, as in there is too much different between shade and direct sunlight on the skin of the girl.
In discussing sigmoid, it was made clear to be that they can be quite different in how they handle skintones if the skin is in the highlights (as in, direct sunlight as in this file).
Also, the extreme difference in light between the two subjects makes this a shot I normally do not use / post / share. But I’m interested if people have techniques to get something likeable out if it.
There are two angles to go here - and many others of course 
. The skin of the girl can be ‘skewed’ towards something more likeable. But for evaluating tone mappers, I would think I would like the hue to be similar to before tone-mapping.
What I mean is that, when I look at the LCh color-picker, I see a skin-hue of about 43/44.
Now, I think that’s too red to be pleasant. But in this case, I see it as ‘the truth of the shot’.
So yes, I get more pleasing results by skewing the hue towards the 50-ish… but for a tone-mapper I see that as a hue-shift / an error. Or in this case, a lucky accident :).
Anyway, I’m interested in techniques to handle the dynamic range. But also to see what other people find ‘a pleasing skin tone’. And if what filmic does is an annoyance, an error, or just how it should be… or everything is wrong and you just have to make something of it .
(The only likeable edits I got from this is with heavy masking and changing the white-balance locally of the kid to give some warmth, etc… Spend some real time with it, which I normally do not want to do with simple family snapshots, I just flag the image as a reject and move on).
P5020458.ORF (13.0 MB)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .
