Introducing the filmic module in darktable

[Elle (Elle Stone)]

@anon41087856

Following up on the matter of making darktable’s editing workflow more efficient, and images look better, my last module was merged yesterday into master. It is based on Troy Sobotska’s plugin for Blender, and on my previous work on the logarithmic tone-mapping all boundled at once. Is is intended to fit with my other change of the color balance module . These two can replace a lot of silly things inside darktable and don’t mess-up the colors as most Lab module do, or the whole pipe as the base curve do (please, folks, stop using that nonsense).

I put up some sample metrics for “how messed up” are colors from a sample base curve compared to your “unbreak profile” and “filmic” modules here:

Messed up colors by the number - darktable's new unbreak and filmic modules

I’m assuming that the colors in a scene-referred interpolated raw file (no “make it pretty” algorithms) are as close to the actual scene colors as most of us can get given that when we take pictures we don’t also measure scene colors using specialized equipment. If the colors in the scene-referred interpolated image file are taken as the “not messed up” colors, then the degree that post-processing produces “messed up colors” can be quantified given suitable metrics. I used two metrics: How …