Why use filmic?

[ggbutcher (Glenn Butcher)]

@DWJP

What I cannot however fathom, is whether people are electing to use filmic because it is more consistent/numerical and involves moving sliders as opposed to randomly dragging a curve around, or are they doing it because they prefer images with less color in the shadows and highlights, which as understand it was the author’s original intention.

I get the impression that it is the former, and that filmic is essentially being used as a curve tool, but I’d be interested hear what other people think.

FWIW, I wrote something about it last July, here’s a link:

Filmic, when to use?

A quite timely question for me, I just finished implementing the Duiker filmic curve in my hack software… It became evident to me about a year ago that I needed more fine-grained control of a tone curve with high-bitdepth image data. Looking at most raw histograms of unscaled data, it is predominant to see most of the data over at the left. Indeed, if you can zoom in on the histogram, you find that a lot of tonality sits in the first 256 values of a 16-bit raw image (libraw delivers unmodifi…