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Comment by nuclx | Hacker News Reader

I gave Darktable a try (never used Lightroom), and as an amateur, it is still kind of hard for me to achieve something better than the "out of camera" JPGs when post-processing RAW photos from my rather old Canon DSLR camera. I don't want to do elaborate stuff like working with masks / applying filters to sections of the photo only. Only thing I usually do is increase saturation, and, rarely, brightness/aperture. Saturation is maxed in OOC-JPGs anyways leading to clipping if it's increased more for the overall image. And what I almost forgot, lense correction and rotating towards drawable vertical or horizontal lines are great features.

So what it does for me is basically barely noticably adjusting the saturation/contrast values, fixing the horizon and applying lense correction.

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Keep in mind that darktable really insists on doing things from the ground up, and pretty much requires you to understand the underlying pipeline and what you want to achieve. If you are just experimenting with random sliders, you aren't likely to get good results.

It mostly sticks to standard industrial and scientific definitions instead of marketable names, and contains very little "magic" that is common to commercial photography software (such as saturation intentionally not being actual saturation, hidden curves, and so on). So you can use any good book on photography/videography and color science, and directly apply it to most of the stuff it has.

Additionally, the developers spend a lot of their time explaining their reasoning and writing about the theory in general, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/user/s7habo/videos - this channel is consistently great for both basic and non-obvious things

https://discuss.pixls.us/c/software/darktable/19 - main darktable forums, has very good discussions and explanations

https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/ Dr. Rant of darktable. Primarily technical stuff.

I occasionally try to come back to DarkTable, RawTherapee etc, but similarly for my requirements they feel like overkill, and require much more time than I have to properly understand the underlying theories.

For a simpler interface that gets me (a naive user) half-way decent results pretty quickly, I'll drop back to LightZone. Whole bunch of ready-made presets that combine primitives (sharpness, contrast, saturation, curves etc), and easy to save new presets once you find a combination you like.

Gonna check it out, thanks for the tip.

Lightroom user here.

It's over hyped. Yeah, it's cool and all but anything else would do the same thing. The only thing that I actually found is better in Lightroom is the AI detection features. Same can go with Photoshop and paint.net (or gimp if you're into that kinda thing.)

> I don't want to do elaborate stuff like working with masks / applying filters to sections of the photo only. Only thing I usually do is increase saturation, and, rarely, brightness/aperture.

You can't change the aperture after the image has been captured. I don't think you're the intended audience for darktable. Give https://filmulator.org/ a try!

What I meant was exposure compensation, sorry. Filmulator might be worthwhile to try, I'll check it out.

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