How to determine when the midtones are properly exposed using the exposure module?

[kofa (István Kovács)]

@nodal

Surely the Zone System in the darktable Tone group comes close to what you would like?

Zone System is now deprecated. It will go away for new edits. Soft deprecated by AlicVB · Pull Request #6915 · darktable-org/darktable · GitHub

@priort

there is a picker in the exposure module to let you use an area for exposure…maybe select that area see what ev you end up at and then add or subtract the amount of ev you need to get that to your desired set point

I find it much simpler to drag the slider until I like what I see. The exposure picker can operate in two modes:

• select an area and a percentage to blow out → not what I need
• select an area and specify what percentile should have what exposure value (mid-grey is about -2.4 EV), but you can’t average an area; you could try targeting the 50th percentile. I think this is rather awkward.

It’s not a serious issue, I don’t find adjusting exposure hard manually. I just thought that with a workflow centred around mid-grey it’d make sense to add support to set exposure based on mid-grey to the module.