Which module for contrast to use? Filmic or color balance rgb?

[anon41087856]

@charlyw64

For me the need for damage control (this coming from the „inventor“ of the module is making this even worse) means that something is fundamentally wrong with the whole concept of the filmic module… I don’t think that a module should “damage” the contrast that late in the pipeline that it needs major repair work - it means that the module basically is destroying a lot of decisions the photographer has made beforehand, either in camera or in basic development settings.

Be my guest, develop a better one. Your speech is basically saying that one technical solution should be perfect and have no trade-offs… I have never seen any perfect solution in the real world. Converting from large to small dynamic range will be destructive no matter what you do, and what you think it should be is cool but imcompatible with reality. The best we can do is damage control. Otherwise, we simply clip whites at 100% and be done with it.

@charlyw64

The larger RAW capabilities protect us from mistakes we make to a certain degree but compressing or tone mapping the captured data late in the edit is completely the wrong way to approach this unless you want to have a HDR image (yuck, I hate HDR look thoroughly) and only then this module behaviour IMHO would be acceptable.

You don’t get it. The raw capabilities don’t have a spirit of their own, they are worth nothing if the soft can’t use them. And your screen or printer have a quarter to an half of what the raw is capable of (color space gamut as well as dynamic range). Also the raw is full of metameric errors that don’t match human tristimulus and its colorimetry is entirely screwed. Shooting raw is a guaranty of nothing and you should open your church if you think it protects from anything.

@charlyw64

If I were a forensic detective I may need the former but as a photographer I must have the latter, Darktable will probably be not viable for that in the long run since many of the needed filters fr the display referenced workflow have been sacrificed on the altar of technical correctness and are deprecated…

Yeah, right. It’s not as if I had a full portfolio of darktable-edited pics that sacrifice absolutely nothing. Portfolio - Aurélien PIERRE, Photographe Also, that technical correctness has been embraced by Blender, Filmlight Baselight, Natron and other software targeted at people who actually know what they are doing (and went to school to learn it…). Make from that what you will.

@nosle

I’m sorry this is just absurd. Some did some didn’t Constable springs to mind but there are so many and anyone just thinking briefly should remember one, by a famous artist or just a print in a toilet. I think you are getting unnecessarily stuck in your head forgetting things you’ve actually experienced.

A quick internet search shows that even Constable didn’t break the “rule of the sky”: it should be lighter than the ground. Which means the dynamic range allocated to the sky is pretty much bounded by the one taken by the ground. Which means you don’t have that much contrast available for cloud (typically 2.5 EV, over 8 EV of output DR). I’m not stuck in my head, I’m concerned about the validity of what photographers want before wondering how to do it.

@charlyw64

That is exactly my point, filmic requires early fixing of properties but that also puts a straight jacket on the processing you can do because it does way too much damage late in the processing because at the end it tightens that straight jacket.

Did you actually ever watch one of my videos ?

[EN] basic photo processing for beginners in darktable 3.6

@grubernd

Nope. Well, I might have had them, but some things can just be ignored. That’s the job of the printer to take care of those details.

That’s actually the job of the color management system (CMS) and the purpose of the ICC… Those “perceptual”, “relative colorimetric” intents from the ICC are meant for just that. If you need to manually tweak colors and saturation for each medium, it only means the CMS failed and that’s something to report to its dev team.

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I’m really starting to wonder if you people realize filmic is nothing but a tone curve. It does exactly what the base curve does, only with more options and in a generalized framework that can deal with scene-referred too. The main difference is in how you set up the curve, because the base curve GUI is really impractical when the dynamic range increases (otherwise, you get the log scaling of the graph… which filmic does internally).

At the end, both only produce a fucking S curve, which is what everybody does everywhere. So I don’t get where that anti-filmic/anti-correctness rage comes from. You can also use filmic in a display-referred framework (juste rework the dynamic range bounds).

As such, filmic holds the same drawback as any S curve : compressing highlights, hence local contrast. Nothing new. What’s new is you can set filmic straight from lightmeter readings done on scene.

[priort (Todd Prior)]

@anon41087856

At the end, both only produce a fucking S curve, which is what everybody does everywhere. So I don’t get where that anti-filmic/anti-correctness rage comes from. You can also use filmic in a display-referred framework (juste rework the dynamic range bounds).

If filmic was like demosaic or something applied in the pipeline that the data must go through to give you a base image and people didn’t like how it behaved I guess you could perhaps rationalize some push back but it isn’t its just another module to be used when needed or by preference and it can be part of your workflow or not .

This is the part I don’t get. DT provides you with a wide array of modules and you can move them around in the processing order if you like so I am not sure how much more flexible it could be…

[bastibe (Bastian Bechtold)]

@anon41087856

At the end, both only produce a fucking S curve, which is what everybody does everywhere. So I don’t get where that anti-filmic/anti-correctness rage comes from.

I think it can feel like you should manage all things contrast and tone with Filmic. Some of the early communication on filmic did leave me with that impression, at any rate. And then you find out that filmic is not a great tool for that job and leaves you with flat bland images if pushed too far. Of course in reality you should just use the tone EQ and the contrast EQ and all the other things to get a pleasing image like you always had, and leave filmic alone for the most part. After all, you didn’t usually faff with the base curve, either.

(I say that as someone who has been there, and complained about it here. Mea culpa.)

[Leniwiec (Michał)]

Indeed, with a bit of good will and being eager to learn, one can get used to Filmic (and the whole scene-referred concept) rather quickly.

I can see this workflow’s upper hand in many scenarios over display-referred, but I had to clarify and understand few things - and I got excellent help from the users here.

And for commercial printing, I work in a printing house since 2008 as a DTP & Digital Printing guy, primarily preparing files for offset, and really, proper CMS handles e.g. total ink limit, so… well… I’ve never worked for Ferrari, true, but I can’t remember so complicated and dreadful challenges - where using Filmic would get me kicked out from my job - Charly mentioned