Proposal for a new and artist friendly VFB

We all know about the blender compositor. It is a great and useful tool to do advanced compositing and create complex and flexible structures. However I feel like an archviz artist (or any other person focussed maybe more on still images) shouldn't have to use such a sophisticated and complex system to apply basic effects like bloom. and mixing the all new lightgroups together.

I think a lot can be gained if some of these commonly used features were to be added the VFB (framebuffer). Vray and Corona both do this in an excellent way in my oppinion. To apply bloom, change the exposure, and do some basic HSL and value maniputation could and should be such a simple task, but to add bloom in blender I am forced to go into the compositor, and to change the exposure I have to go into the render settings. These are of course small actions that take little time. But optimising and streamlining things like these into a neat workflow are exactly the things that could make blender much more viable for large industries.

So my proposal is as follows. Add a simple bar to the side of the VFB with a few simple features.

• Exposure
• Whitebalance
• Green-Magenta
• Contrast
• Saturation
• Lift/gamma/gain
• Vignette (maybe a real optical one?)
• Maybe a form of highlight compression? (maybe this makes no sense with the filmic tonemapper im not sure)

Along with these features I would like to see a lightmixer. To do this now, we have to add all of the passes together in the compositor and if you want tint controls you have to also add a color multiply to each. As of now, doing all this might as well be done in photoshop.

I am well aware this new VFB might not align well with blender's design philosophy and might be too industry specific to implement. As I said myself, you might aswell just take the individual lightmix layers into photoshop and mix them like that at that point... With that said, I would still advocate for this since it's a feature that will undoutably change the way people use blender and it will be for the better. I am quite sure a lot of people would prefer this workflow over the current one. And I also know nodes is all the rage now and I will probably piss some people off by suggesting it, but nodes are simply not always the awnser.