Most of what you'd want to do with Darktable is more akin to developing your picture, rather than editing it.

Look at it this way: your camera captures a lot more information than a JPG can hold. Either you let the camera decide which bits to keep, or you shoot RAW and use a tool like Darktable to help you decide for yourself.

And because I know what my tooling is capable of, I can tweak the first stage (setting up the camera to capture the image) bearing in mind the way I want to process it, to get a better picture than I'd otherwise be able to take in that context.

Of course, I could also set up the camera to have the right levels of saturation, sharpening etc. before taking the picture, but the camera controls aren't nearly as fine-grained and I don't have time while shooting to tweak and re-shoot every image several times.

That's a common misconception. People always manipulated photos. From the very beginning. It just was more constrained and required a different set of [technical] skills when it was still done in a darkroom, using multiple exposures or even working on the negative directly.

http://petapixel.com/2013/09/12/marked-photographs-show-icon...

The photo itself is a manipulation of what you're actually seeing. You play with your f/iso/speed to get what you want. So long as you haven't lost any data (over/underexposed), you can further develop it in Lightroom. If you're capturing in RAW, this is an essential part of the process.

So your argument is you limit your manipulation to just the camera, with its crappy screen and limited ability to show you color calibrations.

There is something to say about that as an art form. Some people use pin-hole cameras. Some people still use film. That's fine if that's what you're going for. But just because you load a photo into software doesn't mean you're editing it any more than just flipping those settings on your camera.

Tell that to Ansel Adams. Or is he not old school enough for you?

What a silly comment.

By that criteria Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and just about every famous photographer ever are not "real photographers".

It's even more silly with regard to digital photography because raw sensor data is just a bunch of numbers that have to be interpreted and converted to an image somehow. There's no such thing as an unprocessed digital photograph. Either a person is shooting RAW and tweaking the conversion themselves, or the camera is doing it behind the scenes using a preset interpretation of the raw data.

Are you serious? Photographers have been manipulating pictures in the dark room since forever!

>>Real photographer, old shool photographer, don't edit the picture after, if you need to edit it it's was not a good picture :-)

I guess you're too young to have ever worked in a 'real' 'old skool' darkroom then?

Where do you think the phrases like "mask" and "burn in" that your graphics software uses came from?