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Bring back the interface of the zone-system
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I found the old, discontinued zone system highly intuitive. It clearly showed how you were distributing dynamic range, and how you could take some dynamic range from a portion of the spectrum and use it somewhere else.
The Filmic does that but it's like there are only two zones (dark and light) and it's not as visual.
The Tone Equalizer seems to redistribute the dynamic range but again it is not so clear exactly what it is doing. For example, increasing the (-8 ev) changes the mid-tones. The zone-system interface was very intuitive in that respect: If you want more details in one range, you will give it up in the others.
Describe the solution you'd like I would like the user interface of the zone system, with the 8 bands, either in Filmic or in Tone Equalizer.
This is about the user interface. I am not asking about the zone system to be returned although I would not mind it.
Alternative would be some kind of display how the dynamic range is distributed.
filmic is a tonemapper - quite different use case. it's about bringing darkt and bright tones in an unlimited range into a limited range using a fixed midgrey. --> here it's more about defining the curve for this mapping, but there are further ideas: https://discuss.pixls.us/t/blender-agx-in-darktable-proof-of-concept/48697
Alternative would be some kind of display how the dynamic range is distributed.
See https://darktable-org.github.io/dtdocs/en/module-reference/processing-modules/filmic-rgb/ section dynamic range mapping.
Tone EQ has nothing to do with the zone system and doesn't redistribute the dynamic range either. It's essentially an advanced (local contrast preserving, scene-referred) tone curve.
It's not about getting the GUI back - I confess I also find it intuitive for usage - it would be about implementing such a tool working in scene/unbounded space. So a new module as I see it.
Tone EQ has nothing to do with the zone system and doesn't redistribute the dynamic range either. It's essentially an advanced (local contrast preserving, scene-referred) tone curve.
Thanks, did not know that. I noticed that if you put a slider to the extreme it also influences the rest of the image.
It's not about getting the GUI back - I confess I also find it intuitive for usage - it would be about implementing such a tool working in scene/unbounded space. So a new module as I see it.
So it's not just a refinement of what Filmic is doing? I heard an explanation on how it was mapping the image (scene?) onto the target and distributing the dynamic range when it's doing that.
One of the graphs even looks like the zone system, just without the fine control.
Tone EQ has nothing to do with the zone system and doesn't redistribute the dynamic range either. It's essentially an advanced (local contrast preserving, scene-referred) tone curve.
Thanks, did not know that. I noticed that if you put a slider to the extreme it also influences the rest of the image.
Actually what happens would depend on your mask and settings...for a given mask it could be that the slider does nothing at all...
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Sorry for reviving this old issue. I've also been wanting the zone system back, so I got to work (with some help from claude) and converted the zonemapper to scene referred. In the same process I also changed the zonemapper to use a nurbs curve for generating the zonemap, which should remove sharp edges. If someone wants to try it it's in my fork: in the feature/zonemapper_nurbs branches (one branched off master and one off 5.2.1). Currently no OpenCL processing
https://github.com/cycomanic/darktable
If you think it's really good why not open a PR so we can discuss as usual?
@jenshannoschwalm I'd definitely be open for that. There's still a few issues I'd like to address first (fix the opencl processing and some weirdness about moving the control points in the GUI), so it would be good to get some feedback first.
The other question I have is around backwards compatibility, my port likely subtly changes existing edits. So would it be better to create a new module or do some sort of versioning on the module?
If you dont want to keep old edits it would have to be a new module.