On Photorealism

It should be noted that "photorealism" as used here does not mean "as though you were standing there" but rather a literal interpretation of "realistically photographic". That is, there's a loose trend to try and emulate the general photographic ideas of dye density depletion.

Briefly, when some say the rather horribly overloaded word "Filmic", it is uttered without any general guidance as to what it means. In the case of this Filmic, it means the general trend of considering a piece of photographic positive film as loosely three dye layers that are attenuated in terms of density as the image is formed. That is, the dye existed as a range of maximal thick density to no dye present.

The impact of this is remarkably complex, even at this most basic level.

As a mixture of electromagnetic energy hit the film of a specific wavelength composition, it would expose the sensitive layers accordingly. If a mixture had a spectral composition that was close to the dye layer sensitivity, it would expose and, as a result, attenuate in density more rapidly. This is not quite as simple as merely meaning that as the dyes attenuated the "colours" faded, which they did, but rather that as the channels attenuate, some mixtures became actually more chroma laden, en route to gradually being mixed with achromatic light overall.

It should be noted that in the discussion of film dye densities, or some conflated idea around "curves" in mixing and matching layered subtractive approaches versus purely additive light mechanics, the nature of any "curve" should be scrutinized as to meaning in terms of impact on the audience looking at the work. There has been a dearth of discussion on this front, extending up to absolute conflation of what "curves" do.