Can you tell us about your background a bit when it comes to coloring and lighting?
It seems like you are revising troy’s AGX, however, without going into the technical details here,
It comes to an issue of trust for those who lack in technical knowledge, I want to try your revision but how do we know that the product itself is sound and not full of issues?
With troy, we have learned to trust him as he “Crawled” his way into blender’s core with the developers using SOME segments of filmic version he made, Let alone his posts show that he is somewhat knowledgeable in his crafts and field.
I am sort of a “beginner” myself on topics pertaining to 3D… I started using blender almost 2 years ago, and so I am not a total beginner, but I focused more on characters and games and creating assets… only recently I started to care about color grading because I discovered for a chance that there are those settings like filmic, standard and so on… I talked with some people and they told me to enable filmic, out of the box I was seeing those ugly results, colors all looking ugly, everything looks ugly and I was feeling cheated and even I was suspecting that people purposefully misled me to ruin my mood and my renders…
Point is that, blender is used by many people, some are photographers and they bring with themselves all those biases that they get while using “realistmisting” softwares like photoshop where they do a big deal about “realism”… and they think that everything has to be looking muh realismistic for reasons I never cared to investigate, and these people obviously tell you how they solve their problems… which is fair… if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail…
Now I come to the solution… Unfortunately I had to cope with filmic for a while because I wanted to see “whats the deal”, but that was a positive experience because I also got into compositor and you can always cheat your way to success adding some color grading…
I installed AGX instead of filmic, that straight out of the box is even uglier but also more “realistic” than filmic… basically you can enable “punchy” and also increase power to add even more contrast, which results in some sort of setting that could work very well for anime and stylized non realistic renders.
Please dont be angry at the realism bullies, they simply hold a hammer and they squash everything because they think its a nail… sort of like we do. Not everyone is into realism, but its really an issue of having a hammer and thinking everything is a nail… there are solutions out there… you can always enable standard and never use filmic if you really don tlike it…
It’s not really about “realism”, but smoother chromatic attenuation. Think of seeing a laser beam in real life, and an artistic representation of it on canvas, it’s never about “realism”.
I also want to mention my version of AgX now comes with the Guard Rail view transform that replaced the “Standard”, you can try it out if you are interested.