First time since AgX came out I stumbled upon some pictures already processed with filmic. Decided to leave everything the same, just swap out filmic for AgX.
To my surprise, I preferred the filmic look to the AgX one, when left to my own devices. By a decent margin. When I tried to match filmic, maaaybe I got something that’s marginably better than filmic was, at least as far as vibe goes, but still with issues.
Now this was an image which had both more and less saturated parts (blue as you call it in english, but really a grey dog with green background) and somehow the dog always came out too colorful with Agx, Even with the smooth preset, even with saturation dropped way down.
Ironically enough (AgX’s main selling point is color) I’m sure I will keep using AgX with Black and white LUTs, which is my main gig. pivot relative exposure/target output is very useful for that I think, so is the rather reactive saturation that can be used to push tonal separation with color filter style LUTs. And I think I like what the curve is doing better.
But I’m seriously considering using Filmic as default for color, maybe unless I really want to mess with the color.
But it somehow defies logic, sounds backwards, so I wanted to ask what your opinion is on the two, now that the novelty wore off a bit.
The question obviously only work if it did indeed wear off, maybe I’m a bit early
A big drawback of AgX is that tonal contrast is linked with saturation. This is not an issue with filmic and OpenDRT, which use a norm (a luminance-like quantity derived from the input RGB).
I find that filmic tends to create too dark and oversaturated skies, and usually drag the highlights saturation mix to the left (towards negative values) to avoid that.
I raise contrast until I think the saturation is high enough, and if I still need contrast, then I grab Color Balance RGB, where contrast doesn’t affect chromaticity.
For me filmic is still the only way to get deep blue and detail in the sky of high DR scenes… Or at least I haven’t found a way to do it with AgX or Sigmoid. I don’t think I have tried underexposing and rising the shadows with Tone EQ or something, might try.
I think the filmic look has its place. It works great in direct sunlight but I find it struggles with lower contrast scenes. I prefer filmics rendering of skin tones to AgXs, it feels more natural “as my eyes see it” to me and I tend to work more with colour contrasts when using filmic and like how you can work the luminosity using filmic and the colours with e.g. CBRGB.
That being said, I find it harder to create punchy, contrasty and bold looks with filmic and I process 99% of my photos with AgX.
I am not sure if this is the getting the same effect you want. But for this I often use a mask of the blues and use the RGB Primaries to raise the purity of the blues…
I had to crank the blue purity all the way to 400% to get anywhere close. The best effect is CB RGB with blue/bright mask and high saturation + lower brightness – that’s the closest to filmic.
I don’t like that it relies on good masking, since it’s a strong effect, but oh well
Okay, maybe different shooting styles or different effects what we want to accomplish. But that is so awesome about darktable, there is almost always a way to get the job done
Had a brief play with AgX and Sigmoid (enough to write/edit the docs) but I’ve always been perfectly happy with filmic and never really seen a good reason to switch.
Those kind of photos seem a bit rare in my gallery tho, lately I tend to blow the sky completely if I feel like recovering color is too much of a hassle
I’ve never been happy with the color processing of bright and saturated colors, especially for sunset. It’s either p*ss yellow or salmon sunset. Nothing in between. Tone curve can help, but I’d rather it be done by the tone mapper. The ability to choose the precise level of hue correction is what I like about Sigmoid and AgX
I started with filmic - several online tutorials touted how powerful it is. I was satisfied with it overall, but found that it was a little cumbersome to use. There is the layout with different options on different tabs. Also, I’d find I needed to jump back-and-forth to color balance rgb sometimes.
Then I discovered sigmoid, which I initially dismissed because it looks less technical on the interface-side, and I incorrectly assumed it was older and less capable. Once I got the hang of it, which didn’t take long, my workflow was faster. I have only gone back to filmic in a couple of instances since then.
Then AgX was released in December, and by that time I was following the development discussions on this forum. Feedback was so uniformly positive that I had to learn it. So I have.
I especially like the way the tone curve editing was implemented. I find it to be very intuitive and yet with great control. Tone curve editing is a snap and takes almost no time to get what I want.
To-date I’m doing color grading outside of AgX. I find it easier to judge color by turning those modules on and off (blink-blink).
I happen to like the increase in color saturation that occurs with contrast in AgX. To my memory it is similar to sigmoid in that regard. It’s easy enough to turn down saturation if desired.
AgX is part of my default workflow, and I see no need to use the other tone mappers except for special cases. Most likely I would use filmic there.
DT is about choice. Base curve, filmic, sigmoid and AgX all give a slightly different result. The preference is for the individual to decide. I rarely use filmic, but when I do it is usually for wide dynamic range captures. I find Sigmoid is the easiest for a new user to DT as it gives great results usually straight out of the box. AgX however is my default and for the last few days I have been using some Fujifilm styles created around AgX for my Canon R7 captures.
So use which ever tone mapper you want, or don’t use any tone mapper at all.
Filmic started the salmon wars, which sensitized me to highlight rendering and color rolloff. Once I had seen how saturated highlights should look like, I couldn’t unsee it.
Not coincidentally, that’s when I got fed up with Capture One and its cyan skies, magenta roses, and yellow fires; got annoyed at DxO Photo Lab’s aggressively desaturated white skies and flames; and was troubled by the amount of highlight recovery I had to add to every picture in Lightroom just to get color in the highlights. But filmic didn’t sit right with me either. For every skin highlight that remained satisfyingly fleshy, there was a salmon sunset, or a brown fire. It worked very well for reflected light, but emitted light never looked right to me.
When I look back at my photos of that time, I can spot the filmic renders immediately. That’s never a good sign. Later I learned that there are delicate limits to saturation and brightness: If you get them wrong, reflected colors start to look uncannily emissive, and highlights look unreasonably crunchy.
Then Sigmoid came along, and provided a framework that finally explained to me what went wrong in all these previous models. That is, highlight hue shifts and desaturation are inevitable for rendering brightnesses beyond the screen’s/print’s white point. Instead of fighting them, I started to embrace them. I realized that I liked my skies partly blown, so as to not distract from the foreground. That highlights are not something to be recovered, but a counterpoint that provides contrast for the subject. That it was the highlight smoothness that counts, not the saturation recovery.
For sure, these realizations also imparted a look to my images that is recognizable. But this time, it’s a stylistic choice, not a rendering artifact. Still, it is quite possible that this phase, too, will be replaced by something better eventually. But that’s part of the journey. For now, I am very much in team Sigmoid/AgX.
Me too. I had a lot of very saturated highlights like sky, which I no longer use at all. I believe this was due to how it rendered skies, so I tried to compensate with more saturation… There is definitely a filmic look to those older pictures which I no longer enjoy very much. Granted this was with earlier versions of filmic as I was an adopter from the start, so maybe the very latest one (only found in Ansel I think?) is better at this.
I sometimes try this, though mostly for darkening. More often then not it doesn’t work, sky usually borders with trees, branches, leaves, and I find I can’t nail down masking well enough to both have a significant enough effect and avoid artifacts in such areas
