More practicing in the last two nights, after having watched
Aurélien PIERRE Photo's video series on filmic-rgb and the tone equalizer, skipping over most of the math/physics, which I'm rather familiar with and playing at 1.5x speed. I really like his style of developing the presentation while he talks, everything is very well presented. Best talks in my "physics years" were all developing their material with chalk and blackboard, not just showing pre-made diagrams etc.
Among my landscape shots, I have a lot of DNGs with a very high dynamic range. The workflow using filmic to construct a "base curve equivalent" - with proper de-saturation of both ends, is very different from using a fixed base curve first and later doing adjustments around it, as is the case both for DT 2.6 and Rawtherapee.. There is a lot of good advice on when to use it in which way. Using both is a somewhat iterative process, because filmic-rgb needs to come after the tone equalizer in the pipeline, and you can visually make sense of the result of the tone equalizer only after passing through filmic, and the optimal filmic settings in turn are dependent on you tone equalizer settings. So I find myself going back and forth between both a few times, in turn circling between filmic's scene and presentation tabs several times usually.
Originally posted by jbinpg The developer of the filmicRGB module says that if using filmic, one must disable basecurve. As well the only other modules you should use are tone equalizer and color balance. Using any of the other level adjusting modules will destroy proper filmic results. I have no problem adjusting the blacks in filmic using these modules.
I did in a few instances use thing like a graduated filter or even vignette (brightness only) in the pipeline
before the tone equalizer, which brought the required adjustments in the tone equalizer into much more of a sane range, making it a lot less extreme and more useful. And of course, there are other modules, which affect the tones, that - used sensibly - do make sense to be used in conjunction with filmic, after it in the pipeline, such as 'color zones'. What you want to ensure is, that you don't carelessly move values in/out of the de-saturation ranges that filmic produced, so you mostly stay within the 'latitude range, otherwise you'd really destroy some of the filmic work.
Below is an example output from last night, a photograph taken in 2013 which I have struggled with to process earlier. I do have a reasonable Rawtherapee version, but wasn't really happy. With DT3.0/tone equalizer/filmic I still struggle with a color version, but the I'm fairly happy with the B&W one, reaching a nice separation from the trees in the background as intended:
My main concern was that the tone equalizer still generated a hint of a bright zone around the tree, especially visible when attempting split toning. I have avoided most of it above by tweaking the mask parameters, but there is still some on the right side of the tree.