Usually, I don’t need a ‘tone corrector’; I only use tone equalizer for extreme dynamic ranges, or sometimes to lift the shadows.
In all cases, the first step is using exposure to get the midtones right. Filmic (and sigmoid) don’t alter the brightness of middle grey. Then, with filmic, I auto-pick white and black (and change the proposed value if the image should not have anything white or black in it), and check that the curve has no inversions (highlighted in orange). If it does, I set the toe or shoulder on the advanced tab to safe (the default is hard).
If the result is too flat, and contrast does not help, I compress the dynamic range using tone equalizer. After that, I need to re-adjust filmic.
Thank you for your reply. I ask because in Darktable I usually have a problem with clipped tarry blacks, which I don’t notice in Rawtherapee or Lightroom.
Try to get used to adding exposure to bring up the midtones first… then deal with shadows and highlights. This is basically what @kofa is saying. I use the exposure auto picker and I start with filmic off to see the image unmapped. The default is 50% for setting exposure. I sample the whole image and often that is not bad. If I don’t see the value I want then I redraw the selection over an area of interest or wherever the image should be well exposed. From there I add filmic and then decide on mapping black and white. If you see crushed shadows. Try adding and then tweaking if needed the relight preset of the tone eq. I use this one a lot. Also as noted by Boris and others you can make a preset with a linear curve increasing the lift across the zones in a linear way and then tweak this with opacity for shadows…
Frankly, at this point I would recommend that you just use sigmoid instead, it does a better job with less work.
Just set the exposure (in the eponymous module), and in most cases sigmoid does a decent job out of the box. Fine tune with skewness and primaries if you want, see presets.
Yes. I used the Sigmoid module quite often until I noticed that I couldn’t get the lights in good focus. When Sigmoid is on, the details in the lights are very blurry. However, the Filmic RGB module works much better
I found that, too. One trick with sigmoid, though, is to enable local contrast, and increase the highlight detail there. You can even create a masked instance, and use the multiply merging mode.
Here’s an example (the original, intentionally bland version on the left is not representative of what sigmoid can do, it’s only for illustration purposes; the image is from a PlayRaw):
Filmic allows you to explicitly set the white and black points; sigmoid does not: the latter relies on skew and contrast, but those are not as flexible as filmic’s direct controls.
