###Overview of Filmulator
Filmulator the editor is primarily designed to bring you the Filmulation algorithm, which is an amazingly versatile tone mapping algorithm that gives Filmulator probably the most unique, and in my opinion pleasing, out-of-the-box look of any raw editor. If you exposed well, most scenes shouldn’t need any intervention.
Filmulator is designed to streamline my (personal) workflow, and if that means sacrificing flexibility, so be it. It uses its literal film simulation to make unnecessary most of the tweaking that I used to have to do when I used a conventional photo editor. The basic result should “just look good” assuming you are satisfied with realism.
I’m not a fan of the Instagram/VSCO look with lifted shadows, split toning, added grain, color shifts, and all that, so I don’t include them.
If you want a realistic look, then Filmulator may be for you. If you want flexibility, Filmulator is not for you.
###Differences with PhotoFlow
PhotoFlow has a workflow designed for working with layers in arbitrary sequences. This is powerful, but it takes more mouse clicks to do a basic edit, unless you develop your own presets.
Filmulator doesn’t even have presets; it’s designed so that you can process every image in a way best suited to it without needing presets to speed up the process.
PhotoFlow has no library management. It seems to be “open a file, edit it, export it”.
Filmulator has you import photos from memory cards, stores them in a configurable folder structure on both your main storage and an optional backup, and lets you easily browse your photos. It offers a histogram of how many photos you took per day, and it lets you change the effective time zone to accommodate trips to other parts of the world without confusingly splitting a day’s photos across midnight. It has ratings that let you mark photos you particularly like. Eventually once I figure out the best way to do it I’ll have tags and stuff.
PhotoFlow’s user interface focuses on the tools.
Filmulator’s user interface focuses on the photo: as a result of needing far fewer clicks, I spend far more time inspecting photos than actually changing settings. So Filmulator renders the full photo every time you move a slider, and once it’s done you can pan and zoom freely at 60 fps, even on a high resolution monitor.
###Devs
Filmulator is a 1.5 man project; me and one of my IRL friends who tends to do mainly backend stuff (image processing).
###Differences from RawTherapee and darktable
Filmulator is focused on having as few tools as possible, and in making a decent output possible with as few mouse clicks as possible. It encompasses the full workflow, more similarly to darktable which has a library system.
darktable has a weird learning curve that I was never able to climb successfully. I was never able to get photos to look the way I wanted out of it, even though I know what each individual tool does. I hear that this is because of the base curve which is applied before everything else in the pipeline, therefore making everything else operate in nonlinear space.
RawTherapee has technically high quality output, but it doesn’t give me the look I want as easily as Filmulator does. I used to use it but would spend ten or fifteen minutes per photo, and it still wouldn’t turn out the way I wanted.
###Ideology
Filmulator is first and foremost for me to use.
I want to have a simple-to-use photo editor that does everything I want with minimal interaction.
I find other editors annoyingly slow to use, because the tools I want are scattered among tools I don’t want, and panning around in images is an exercise in patience; I have 16 gigs of ram and they really ought to be able to render the full image in the background so panning doesn’t lag. (Heck, Filmulator stores the full size image at several stages in the pipeline and it uses only around 2 gigs of ram)
There should only be one tool for each job, and it should be the best tool, and it should have an intuitive UI. Anything else has no place.
###Reason for existence
Why does it exist? Because it’s what I wanted to have.
I didn’t believe that other editor projects would be willing to discard most of their tools, so I’d need to fork them to get what I wanted out of an editor. I also wanted to use a modern UI toolkit to make it easier on me; I might as well start from scratch.
I give it away for free because I believe others might find it useful, and because it might inspire the other existing editors to do better (especially UI).
##TL;DR:
It’s the complete opposite of PhotoFlow.
