It’s not an advice, I just can tell you what I find useful as a starting point to tweak lights’ energy with filmic.
I would try to use a photographic approach using a mid grey card in the scene (or Macbeth ColorChecker for color balance).
If I’m not wrong 0.18 grey should be the filmic_blender mid grey.
I would put the card facing the camera in the position where my subject must be correctly exposed.
I would start from a basic settings of light sources based on my eye, rendering with border (for fast test) the part with the card, and check color values in the Image editor with CTRL+LMB.
Left values are the Scene Referred values, while the right values are Display referred values.
(correct exposure would give you around 0.18 - 0.5).
At this point to have a quick idea of how much tweak the light energy to have a correct exposure in the point where you calculate exposure (card), a useful rough trick is to use the “False color look” + exposure control just for test. Dunno if it’s really a correct workflow but I find it useful.
By tweaking the exposure control until the card becomes grey, you’ll get the EV needed in + or - to have the card correctly exposed.
Considering that +1EV (-1EV) means x2 (x0.5) amount of light (linear), you can do the math and know how much tweak the light values.
For example if you started with energy of 10, and the card in false colour becomes grey with +3.1 EV, the new value of light energy must be 10*(2^3.1).
(And obviously you’ll have to set the exposure control to 0 again and don’t touch it along with gamma).
I repeat that I don’t know if it’s a correct way to set light energy, but it’s useful to me and time saving.
Yeah I know it’s longer to write than to put it in practice.
Since I wrote this post in multiple times and I didn’t checked it, I apologize if something weird is written, cutout, missing or whatever.
Said that in the filmic view you should set one of the contrast preset as a starting point, I guess the washed feeling could be related to the scene itself with low saturation textures.
You sure you’ve read what I’ve said?