Base curve is actually (IMHO) impossible to manually adjust. Filmic RGB gives you FULL control. That + linear editing that comes with it means you have way more room for adjustments. And that “less color in in shadows/highlights” is blown out of proportion. I actually get better colours thanks to better edits overall.
Also - filmic + tone equalizer is godsend for wider dynamic range that would take ages to normally edit.
I find filmic particularly useful for high dynamic range images. For the majority of images, however, I find the base curve or a LUT similarly effective, and less hassle.
So for me, personally, Filmic is a specialty tool for difficult situations. I recon that this is a result of filmic’s linear color space, which allows HDR processing, whereas the other modules only work for small dynamic ranges. (I don’t know if that’s technically true, though).
I was of a similar mind until I re-examined some of my earlier edits. Where I had used the base curve, I found that blue skies had taken on hue shifts that would take time to correct or otherwise live with. The same skies retained their color in Filmic RGB, although sometimes they were desaturated - a condition far easier to correct that adjust the hue.
I think the learning curve challenge with Filmic is that you’re not after a set of steps, or even a common end state, but rather you’re setting boundary conditions on exposure and contrast that enable the module to create a response.
But it becomes a very straight forward exercise once you know the workflow and have a sense of what to expect when finished.
That’s true. I had forgotten about that, as I had switched from base curves to camera-appropriate LUTs a while ago. (Fuji Pro Neg or Astia usually)
I generally use LUTs as my default starting point, and only use filmic in a minority of cases. After some experimentation, I simply found my manual filmic based workflows to essentially converge on my chosen LUT anyway, so it simply made sense to go that way by default.
FWIW, I wrote something about it last July, here’s a link:
Interesting…… Could you please demonstrate this by some examples?
I was sceptical at first and now use it as pert of my standard styles.
basecurve can do the job, but it’s not easy to adjust manually (as noted by Johnny-Bit). So I would make an adjustment in exposure to fill the spectrum to the right edge, apply my standard basecurve, and fix the rest in tonecurve. For what it’s worth, when I had barely to touch tonecurve, the results were very good (technically), but sometimes the best photos are not the ones which are technically spot-on.
filmic RGB being parametric, I can easily fiddle it a bit to take account of the lighting. I then still use tonecurve, but usually for much smaller corrections, and the final result seems better.
Although tonecurve is not supposed to play well with filmic RGB, I’ve not had any problems. There may be if you still have a version from before the power-norm bug was fixed, although in B&W this really didn’t matter.
I still don’t use tone equaliser. I can see the advantages if you want to make a sort of global lighting adjustment. Maybe combined with masks it could do interesting things, but I’m very sensitive to inconsistencies of ligh across the frame. Conversely, tonecurve allows me to make relatively sudden changes in contrast to pick out, for eg, features of a face in shade. I needed to be convinced to invest the time to learn to like filmic RGB, it may happen that I’ll take up tone equaliser one day. These thoughts remain valid only until I close this window 
PS: basecurve in 3.0.0 and beyond is really a different beast to pre-3.0… it used to be applied near the start of the pixel pipe, with most other changes made after. In 3.0.0, it was moved to the end of the pixel pipe, in roughly the same place as filmic rgb. So the big technical change was moving most of the manipulation tools prior to the tone mapping applied in either basecurve or filmic RGB.
I’m leaving home now, so I’ll leave one example.
Default 12%
Bringing it down increases saturation on the horizon. Maybe not the best example, but you can see it changing. I’ve worked on images where the change was more prominent.
I have finally come to terms with Filmic (RGB). It has been a long process but my end product has improved and my processing time diminished. Here is how I now do my processing.
The pixelpipeline is a remarkable help. I can preset most of my processing in the knowledge that dt will ensure that the correct order will be maintained. With that in mind I preset standard settings for ‘local contrast’, ‘LUT 3D’, ‘sharpening’, ‘raw+profiled denoise’ and ‘lens correction’. All that is really left to do is to apply my Filmic RGB.
What I find in the latest versions of Filmic is that the spot picker for middle-grey-luminance does a wonderful job of finding a very good starting point for setting this module. Yes, it may need a bit of final tweaking along with the black and white sliders but on the whole I am generally 90% home with this single click.
Of course, a decent exposure helps immeasurably and yes I do tweak other settings if the contrast is tricky but this general approach does get most of my processing done in a very satisfactory way and in short order.
One thing more that I do notice … the look of my images has changed with this system. I believe it is a more ‘natural’ look with less signs of processing.
I still perform local adjustments on special images that deserve the extra treatment but basic pprocessing is now a ‘breeze’!
Hi’ @gadolf
Thank you for your quick response. You are right, the saturation along the horizon has been improved a little bit by changing the shadow/highlights setting………
If you pull up the display on the current DT 3.4 if you have it and show the ev display not the curve you will see better what happens…That slider shift the latitude region ie the saturation protected area and so shifting it left ie the slider shift the latitude tone mapped area into the highlights…it is very easy to see in that display…I am not on a PC with DT so I can’t put a screen shot…
EDIT pulled this from the blog…using this display play with the sliders…it really is the best way IMO to see what filmic is doing …when you move the slider you will see the latitude shift…
There is a lot to be gained in DT by moving modules around filmic. Boris Hadjukovic does it quite effectively. Often moving instances exposure, colorbalance or local contrast after filmic. As filmic comes later in the pipeline it can be better to introduce color and contrast changes after letting it do its work…just an observation…
The color preservation mode used in filmic has a strong effect…I think it defaults to power norm…it warrants checking from none through all the options…
Sometimes an example in a slightly different context can really help…I find this a good demonstration of why filmic is used…its a blender video but sometimes the videos in DT don’t necessarily show things in a way that everyone might understand …here is another spin on filmic that you might find useful to wrap your head around it…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9AT7H4GGrA&feature=emb_logo
This is a good point that I think is often overlooked - filmic does (in the general case) make it very fast and easy to get an image processed (and in a consistent manner) which is a feature in and of itself. I’ve outlined the workflow I use here (though I need to update it for the changes in 3.4 and other things I’ve learned recently) and for most images I am able to get to a finished result very quickly largely due to the work filmic does
Anyone feels that quite a few shots end up looking a bit tonemapped with filmic?
A soft look like @RawConvert above Why use filmic? - #9 by RawConvert a sort of luminous softness seems where it works best?
I’m sure it’s a matter of tweaking but when I do an edit with dt filmic and then with RT (not using log) and compare the former often looks a bit tonemapped. Is this just me?
If I understand what you mean by “looking tonemapped”, might that be due to exposure being set a bit too high, perhaps? I know that even with exposure set 1-2 EV too high, filmic is quite able to push everything back in display range. But of course, the results won’t look the same…
