Just wanted to share a quick update for those interested in new RAW processing tools. The latest release of RapidRAW, my cross-platform RAW editor, now includes the AgX tone mapper.
Following the development of open source projects like Blender and darktable, AgX provides a more advanced approach to tone mapping. It’s designed to produce more natural, filmic results by better handling extreme brightness and color saturation. This helps avoid the harsh clipping and overly saturated “digital” or “plastic” look that can happen when pushing highlights.
Here’s a quick comparison showing how it handles a +3 EV push compared to the previous tone mapper:
To better support a scene referred workflow with AgX, the exposure controls have also been completely reworked. The old single slider is now split into two distinct tools:
Exposure: A linear exposure compensation for setting the technical white point.
Brightness: A perceptual adjustment that primarily targets midtones, great for finetuning the look after the base exposure is set.
The release also includes a few other features, like a selective Copy & Paste system for adjustments and more control over the processing engine.
You can get the latest release and see the full changelog over on GitHub:
It seems that this is not widely adopted for still image editing and where is is available the word cumbersome is often used. But I wonder if ACES is something that will appear in still image editing more universally in the future. Thanks for the link to the video about ACES in Blender.
I am not implying that ACES will not soon make its way into still photography editing. I am just saying it has not yet been widely adopted. I would certainly like to see it as an option in DT one day as I am sure there will be certain images that would benefit from this approach.
If Krita is used to produce content for incorporation in an ACES workflow (CGI, animation, etc), that’s a prudent inclusion.
I don’t see an ACES use case for “stand-alone” still photography. ACES has specific destination colorspaces corresponding to movie theater equipment and such; still photograpy has to deal with the plethora of monitors and printers out in “the wild”. However, photographers producing still images for inclusion in cinema workflows will need availability of the corresponding ACES profiles for inclusion, where projects use ACES.
Basically (from my understanding) ACES is a full color management system that handles everything from how colors are captured to how they’re shown on different screens. It’s pretty complex and aimed mostly at film, 3d and video workflows.
AgX is just a tone mapper - it focuses on making the image look more natural when bright areas get pushed without weird clipping or colors going crazy.
I added AgX because many users asked for it, and it fits well with how RapidRAW works right now. ACES is definitely interesting, but it’s a bigger project to bring in.
If you have the ability to use ICC-style profiles to export renditions, that would be the trivial “implementation” of ACES. All one would need then to submit stills to an ACES workflow would be an ACES-2065-1 or ACES-cg profile with which to export their images.
Elle Stone’s Well Behaved ICC Profiles includes both of the above:
How are you finding the speed. I see some long pauses when I make a change and the screen blurs and then the preview is fine. Zooming and panning is lightning fast but I feel like I see processing delays…My machine is not crazy fast but I have a 3060 TI, 64 GB DDR5 Ram and 12th Gen i5 processor that seems adequate for DT and its complex math…just wondering if you see that… I also tried one or two images and the noise reduction sliders didn’t seem to do anything … I cranked luma noise correction to 100 which I thought should likely blur and crush the image but I could see little difference between 0 and 100…Just a couple of things that I saw
