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Tips for Usage
This article will help you get the most out of Filmulator and your camera.
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It can unearth shadow noise, and can slightly amplify high-ISO noise.
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Clipping in awkward places can be unpleasant.
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Slightly exaggerates color fringing caused by both lateral and longitudinal chromatic aberration
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Slightly exaggerates white balance errors
Keep these in mind, and you can skip right to the end for 99% of your photos.
This section goes over how to best use your camera before using Filmulator at all.
Filmulator likes highlights either completely clipped, or not at all. Thus, you have three options:
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Expose to the right.
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Fully clip part of the scene.
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Bracket and merge.
By exposing to the right, you ensure that all of the highlight information is captured, but if your sensor has read noise in the shadows and the scene's dynamic range is too wide, Filmulator might lift the shadows enough to show the noise.
Fully clipping the scene is another option. If you do this, however, the center of highlight regions is generally a little darker than the edges, so you have to make sure to clip the entire highlight when doing tone curve adjustments in postprocessing.
Bracketing will let you capture the entire dynamic range of the scene, and Filmulator's statistically ideal exposure blending lets you make the most of the data you have captured. Of course, it comes with the standard drawbacks: if the images aren't aligned, or if a part of the scene moves between exposures, you will get ghosting artifacts.
Filmulator tends to slightly exaggerate white balance errors, making it harder to correct in post-processing. Filmulator currently uses the camera white balance setting from the time of capture, so set that appropriately, whether with presets, Kelvin input, or custom white balance.
My own personal preference here is to shoot with fixed sunny white balance for most outdoor use at any time, and custom white balance indoors. I find that morning or evening light, shot with sunny white balance, turns into a rich, luxurious warm glow after running through Filmulator, while auto white balance kills the effect.
Filmulator ideally operates in the middle of the photo processing workflow. Because of its sensitivity to noise, color fringing, and white balance, ideally these would be corrected prior to the filmulation of the photo. We are working on a GUI which puts the filmulation where it should be, but if you are having trouble with one of the above issues, you can try using dcraw to output a linear TIFF with the following command:
dcraw -q 3 -4 -T -w [filename]
You can apply noise reduction, chromatic aberration correction, defringing, and white balance correction to the resulting TIFF, and then use the -t argument of Filmulator to set that as the source file for filmulation.
This is also the proper way to process panoramas. Convert the raw files, stitch the TIFFs together (with an application such as Hugin), and then Filmulate the stitched panorama. It's an excellent way to deal with the increased dynamic range inherent with the wider field of view.
One useful tool is the highlight recovery options, which have the same behavior as dcraw. They tend to work best on skin that is slightly clipped, non-organic stuff that may be somewhat more clipped, decently on clipped clouds, and not very well on partially clipped blue sky.
One thing to keep in mind is that if you enable highlight recovery (enter a positive value), you should tell Filmulator that the image has around a -0.9 exposure compensation (simply follow the filename with the number). The highlight recovery process on linear files darkens everything dramatically, so by doing this Filmulator will brighten the image in compensation, keeping the highlights where you want them (nice and bright).
Another option is to use dcraw to output linear TIFFs, as described earlier, but with multiple different highlight parameters, and blend them together manually before feeding the result into Filmulator.
Filmulator, by default, uses a text file called configuration.txt located in ~/.filmulator/ to set the film prcoessing parameters. There are many parameters which you don't really need to touch, but a few in particular are useful.
NOTE: Do not reorder the parameters; when read in they are assumed to remain in the same order.
This is the area of the film that is being developed in square millimeters. The default, 864, corresponds to the area of standard 35mm film: 36x24. By increasing this value, all of the features become larger compared to the characteristic length of diffusion in the developer, so Filmulator will tend to further reduce global contrast and primarily increase microcontrast. This leads to a "large-format-like" look (duh, it's simulating large format film suddenly) which can be very appealing at larger display sizes. If this value is decreased, Filmulator acts to emphasize larger-scale features, creating an image which grabs more attention at small sizes. Try it out for yourself!
This affects how much developer is exchanged between the active layer on the film surface and the reservoir of currently inactive developer. By decreasing this value, Filmulator's effects will become stronger: the overall contrast of the image will decrease, and the local contrast will increase. Setting it to 0 will create a fairly dramatic effect, but the resulting images suffer from the haloing classic 'overcooked' HDR is infamous for.
By default, this is 0.2, but for extremely contrasty scenes, such as from bracketed exposures, try 0.4 or higher for a stronger effect without going overboard.
It doesn't take much: that's the beauty of Filmulator! Just sharpen, tweak the tone curve, and most photos are good to go.