Basic guide to Photo Processing
While the user interface is simple and presents a restrained number of sliders, it is not used like a typical photo editor, but rather more like film.
Rather than adjusting the sliders and directly seeing effect on the final result, the workflow is oriented to optimizing the data in several stages, each feeding into the next, with immediate feedback from intermediate histograms.
Filmulator's list of tools are ordered strictly in the same sequence that they are applied to the data. Simply work your way down the tools, adjusting and compensating.
There are seven controls at the top of the image, to the left of the main histogram.
The first, and most complex, is the Lens Selection Dropdown.
The Lens Selection Dropdown allows you to select the lens you shot with in order to digitally correct its flaws. This lens draws from the Lensfun database, so if your lens is not in their supported list, corrections will not be available. Even if it is, some of CA, Vignetting, or Distortion correction might not be available. If there seem to be no supported lenses, go to the Settings tab to check for lens correction updates and update them. Then restart Filmulator.
Ordinarily, your lens will be autodetected. When you click on the down arrow or on the text of the indicated lens, you will see the lens name extracted from the EXIF data, and you can edit this text to search for other lenses. Hitting the refresh button on the right will reset the selected lens back to default, and revert the search back to the EXIF-derived lens name. Ordinarily this box only searches lenses intended for the same mount as your camera, but if you put a backslash \ before the lens name, it will search for lenses for all mounts.
Click on a lens in the list below to choose it for this image, and close the box with the up-arrow button, or do both simultaneously by double-clicking on a lens name.
At the bottom of the Lens Selection Dropdown are two buttons, Remember preferred lens and Forget preferred lens. The preferred lens system has two uses.
- In the case that the lens identification is always wrong for this camera/lens combination, you can use this to, in the future, use this lens by default for this camera/lens combination. Note that if you use multiple manual lenses that identify identically, you should not use this, or all of your manual lenses will be identified as the same lens model.
- This also remembers the four lens correction parameters (Auto CA correction, Profiled CA, Profiled Vignetting, and Profiled Distortion) you have currently set for the image. For new images using the current camera/lens combination where you either haven't touched those settings yet, or images where you've hit the reset button (to return to default) on those, the preferred lens system will store the currently set values as the default for future images so you don't need to re-enable them for every image.
Pressing the Remember preferred lens button will associate lens model and all four correction parameters as the defaults for this camera/lens combination. Pressing the Forget preferred lens button will return to the normal EXIF matching for lens model, and all correction parameters will go back to defaulting to off.
Aside from the Lens Selection Dropdown, there are four more controls at the top of the image. Listed from left to right:
- The light/dark circle controls the background brightness of the editing area. Often, setting a light background is useful for previewing how your images will look in a print, or as seen on a white-background webpage. Keyboard shortcut: B
- The Custom White Balance tool will sample a 21x21 pixel area of the image based on where you click on the image. You can cancel this by pressing the button again. When you sample a white balance, it is immediately applied to the current image, but it's also temporarily stored so that the sampled white balance can be applied to other images taken by the same camera model. The white balance setting is remembered until another sample is taken from a photo by the same camera model, until manually overwritten by the Store WB button in the toolbar on a photo by the same camera model, or until Filmulator is closed. Keyboard shortcut: W
- The Crop tool is a sophisticated tool despite only being activated by one button. When cropping is active (indicated by the button turning orange), moving the mouse just outside of the image will show crop handles. Grab the handles at the edges to resize the width or height of the crop, or grab the handles at the corners to resize both width and height together. Their behavior is influenced by the Ctrl and Shift modifier keys. When dragging a corner, the Shift key will cause the crop box to snap to the nearest common aspect ratio (3:1, 2.76:1, 2.35:1, 2:1, 16:9, golden ratio, 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, and 1:1) in both landscape and portrait orientations. If you like the current aspect ratio, you can lock it by holding Ctrl and it won't change. If you hold Ctrl and drag one of the edges, instead of resizing the crop you will slide it in one direction. If you hold Ctrl and drag the remaining image area, you can then move the crop in both directions. While moving the crop, hold Shift to snap to the image center, both vertically and horizontally. When done cropping, click on the crop button again to return to normal editing. Keyboard shortcut: C
- The Rotate left button will rotate the image 90 degrees to the left.
- The Leveling tool lets you finely adjust the image rotation. When leveling is active (indicated by the button turning orange), begin by placing the guide lines on the image by clicking. Then drag the lines about the center in order to line them up with whatever you want vertical or horizontal. You can reposition the guide lines by dragging near their intersection. Reset the rotation to zero by double-right-clicking, or using the shortcut Shift+L. When done leveling, click on the leveling button again in order to return to normal editing. Keyboard shortcut: L
- The Rotate right button will rotate the image 90 degrees to the right.
At the top right is a histogram of the output image data. This shows you how bright the image is overall.
Immediately below the main output histogram, you'll find a small histogram without any indication of a luminance channel. This is the raw histogram and it gives the ultimate insight into the exposure of your image.
The histogram's horizontal axis is linear: if the histogram ends at the midpoint, then you have exactly one stop of highlight headroom before clipping.
Normally, the green channel on a camera is far more sensitive than the other channels, so you'll find that it clips first on this histogram. Even extremely red subjects often are equally exposed in red and green, so use this to adjust the way you expose in the future.
Generally, the Highlight Recovery tool does nothing at all if there is no actual clipping, and it functions best when only one channel is clipped, so be aware.
The goal of all of the tools before the pre-filmulation histogram is to optimize the "exposure" of the simulated film.
- Auto CA correction will automatically detect and cancel out lateral chromatic aberration. 0 is off, 1 runs the algorithm once, and higher values iterate the algorithm multiple times which can help deal with stubborn chromatic aberration. This is available only for Bayer-array raw files and will not be visible otherwise. Monochrome cameras, X-Trans, full-color raws (like from X-Transformer), and certain brands' SRAW formats will not have this option available. This is mutually exclusive with Profiled CA; if you enable it, Profiled CA (if available) will be automatically disabled.
- Profiled CA is chromatic aberration correction based on correction profiles for the lens listed in the Lens Selection Dropdown at the top of the editing window. This is mutually exclusive with Auto CA correction; if you enable it, Auto CA correction will be automatically disabled. Generally this performs worse than Auto CA correction, but for non-Bayer raws, this may be your only option, if available.
- Profiled Vignetting, if available, will counteract corner darkening based on correction profiles for the lens listed in the Lens Selection Dropdown at the top of the editing window.
- Profiled Distortion, if available, will correct geometric distortion (bending of lines that were actually straight) for the lens listed in the Lens Selection Dropdown at the top of the editing window.
- Highlight Recovery estimates brightnesses higher than what the camera normally records, based on different color channels clipping at different times. Generally this functions best when only one color channel is clipped. If highlight recovery is successful, you can reduce exposure compensation to take advantage of the newfound highlight headroom.
| HL Recovery setting | Effect |
|---|---|
| 0 | This clips all highlights immediately after the preliminary camera white balance, potentially losing valid data in other channels. |
| 1 | This unclips the highlights, which is occasionally useful when red or blue channels are not clipped and you're adjusting white balance strongly. |
| 2 | This does color reconstruction, which easily handles one clipped channel and sometimes two clipped channels. |
- Store WB will let you save white balance parameters for later use on other images taken by the same camera. The Store WB button will overwrite any previous white balance parameters from the same camera model, whether saved by this button or by the custom white balance button at the top of the image viewport.
- Recall WB, if available, will immediately apply the stored white balance parameters.
- Temperature and Tint go together to control white balance. The reset button resets to the camera's selected WB. The Kelvin temperatures are very approximate, and for some cameras waaaay off.
- Exposure Compensation should be used like one would use exposure compensation on a camera: to "properly expose the film". In this case, the film is the pre-filmulation histogram immediately below the slider. Consider that like you would your camera histogram: "expose-to-the-right". The main difference is that "underexposure" doesn't result in noise; it merely makes the highlights more linear (they get darkened less).
After you have "exposed" the film, the program simulates the development of the film. If you're not familiar with the real process of film development, just know that developer is a liquid chemical that gets consumed to make light regions of the film lighter. (Darker, actually, in the case of negative film)
Here's where the magic happens: bright regions consume more of the developer chemical immediately next to the surface of the film. This depletion reduces the rate of development there, reducing the end brightness some. On the other hand, dark regions don't consume much of the developer, and will brighten up more relative to the original ratio.
However, the developer solution also diffuses between adjacent locations on the film, and is also replenished from the bulk liquid that's not actively reacting with the film. The diffusion along the film boosts local contrast, while replenishment from the bulk developer reduces this overall effect.
Now we get to the sliders:
- Shadow Rolloff Point controls how much the shadows roll off, giving the image a "toe" similar to the contrastiness of real film. This has a small effect on the brighter parts of the image, and a stronger effect in the shadows.
- Highlight Rolloff Point controls where and how gradually highlights begin to roll off. The higher it is, the more sudden the rolloff is. At 1, it just saturates at the very right edge of the histogram. The lower it is, the more gradually they begin to roll off. This has the effect of gently desaturating highlights, which can make highlight clipping less ugly.
- Film Area controls the scale of the diffusion relative to the image size. In real life, the diffusion is relatively constant size, but it will be smaller relative to the image for larger negatives. With this tool, you can control whether you want to emphasize large overall regions, or finer details.
- Drama and Overdrive control how much replenishment there is. The higher the drama, the less replenishment occurs, and so the highlights get attenuated more. Overdrive kicks this into high gear to boost the effect.
With the default film area, you can pretty much push drama around as much as you like even with overdrive, but occasionally photos will look overcooked. However, with larger film areas (especially in large format), you should hold back on the drama or else the images will be globally very flat with high contrast edges, approaching the reviled "HDR look". Conversely, though, when you use small film areas you will need to use higher drama than at the default film size.
If you watch the histogram below the Filmulation parameters as you change them, you can see what their effect is on the highlights. You'll see the brightest regions tuck themselves down into the thicker part of the histogram with higher drama settings, and with larger film areas.
The first thing to do after setting the drama is to pick the white clipping point. This is roughly equivalent to choosing the exposure of a print. Lower the whitepoint, and the whole image gets brighter. Raise the whitepoint, and the whole image gets darker.
The black clipping point is used to cut off shadow noise and fog/haze.
These sliders affect the 25% and 50% points, and are followed up by an overall lightening curve, so that the shadow slider actually affects the midtones as well as the shadows. The highlight slider lightly affects the highlights.
By default, the Monochrome switch is off, and you see Vibrance and Saturation.
- Vibrance controls how intense the colors are, but only in the less-intense areas of the image.
- Saturation controls how intense all colors are, including ones that are already very intensely colored.
When you turn Monochrome on, you get a new set of three sliders, Red Weight, Green Weight, and Blue Weight. Adjust these to influence which colors have a stronger effect on the output image. Note that you can exaggerate the influence of one color by setting its value above 1 and setting the other two colors negative.