I use local contrast liberally with masking and blend modes… I like the result. But as I often forgo filmic and sigmoid modules as I don’t need them I don’t have any worry about messing with filmic is usually not a problem. For many images to me there is no gain as you can often lose a lot of detail and then you just work to get it back. I find for the main edit I can use exposure, diffuse and sharpen, tone eq, color balance, local contrast and color calibration and often never need to use filmic… if things are blown out a bit I will then use it but even then I often can manage with a few tone eq instances…
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Define “better” 
I haven’t used filmic v7 yet, but I would encourage everyone to try out sigmoid and filmic to see which they prefer. I don’t think there’s an answer as to which is “better”. Filmic may give more vivid highlight colours, maybe even more accurate, but sigmoid creates a look that you might find much more pleasing (more filmic, ironically). And for newbies, it’s much more of a set-it-and-forget-it kind of module.
But thanks for writing this up. It’s always great when someone puts in the effort and time to help others out who may be having a hard time understanding the software.
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Well done!
I also arrived at a “exposure only” workflow although I highly prefer sigmoid which in my opinion gives better results and with a straight forward interface, too. My default is at 1.2.
My look includes local contrast, contrast equalizer, tone equalizer and highlight reconstruction with inpaint opposed. All kinds of masking in the tools are turned off.
The cameras are set to underexpose around one stop to get that non-digital look going that the analog camera sensors should be providing and we have been denied for so long.
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@garrett - thank you for the time spent on this quite long post and the work on the presets
Almost exact same settings I have, just that on my camera the 1/3-2/3 underexposure is the sweet spot.
Regarding filmic rgb vs sigmoid: I don’t find either intrinsically “better”, in the sense that I can do everything I want with either. I just compensate in different places — darktable is so flexible.
I prefer sigmoid because it is less work to get the results I want.
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I did not have the time yet, but with the mostly stable processing flow I now have (again), I will calibrate my main cameras using their inbuilt spotmeter (again) for those times when I want to be precise.
My compact Panasonic GF7 has a zebra-display that can be set in 5% increments. Set to 100% I get very close to perfect, might have to dial it a bit down to 95%.
I also love how Panasonic stuffs all these features into almost all of its cameras. Many manufacturers, eg Canon, start zebra at “enthusiast” models.
Lately I have been reconsidering my approach to exposure. After studying a lot of b&w film photos, I realized that in a lot of cases I actually prefer to have large amounts of background burn out to near-white (eg photo taken inside a not so bright room, including a window, that overlooks some irrelevant building or whatever).
In these cases sigmoid just shows some hint of details in the white, enough to make it non-uniform but not to draw the eye away from the main theme. The inpainting algorithms of Darktable 4.2 are more than sufficient for this purpose even when some channels are clipped.
Consequently, I no longer do ETTR unless I really want to bring back the detail from the highlights for whatever reason.
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Same here, and also a recent realization. But I do struggle with getting the highlight rolloff as smooth as a modern color negative film.
One small step further … managed to do at least my main camera, so the following settings are very specific.
On the Nikon D500 using spotmetering the threshold seems to be between +2.67 and +3 EV overexposure when measuring the brightest areas that should still contain content.
This is for using RAW of course, highlight reconstruction “inpaint opposed” and sigmoid of 1.3 or less. This allows for pretty much arbitrary changes of the exposure setting in darktable with a smooth rolloff into the lights without blowing anything out while retaining color information up to the top end.
The highlight reconstruction does not have to kick in yet, but it is there for the details that one can not measure with the spotmeter of the camera.
Motives where single channels are extremly over represented - red flowers, anyone? - will need a much more conservative setting to preserve the color information.