On: Darktable: Crashing into the wall in slow-motion

[RobotToaster]

My experience of darktable consists of:

seeing my RAWs looking completely wrong

Googling wtf is wrong

Seeing a bunch of reddit/forum threads of devs telling people that it's a feature not a bug.

Going back to pirating lightroom

[hef19898 → RobotToaster]

How exactly does a RAW file look wrong? Before editing, I assume.

[baq → hef19898]

I’m not sure it makes sense to say that RAW files look good or bad at all. They’re mostly sensor data dumps.

The point is darktable has terrible defaults and terrible usability to allow a novice user to convert the dump to a usable image. Images loaded into darktable are less immediately usable than default camera settings. This might be ok for experienced users, but it’s absolutely disastrous for newbs.

[hef19898 → baq]

Fair enough, quite often I use the camera generated jpgs as well.

[busyant → hef19898]

I've tried DT and my RAW images look washed out by the software defaults.

There are videos and forum responses explaining how to get a more appealing image, but the suggestions require a LOT of work and they assume a pretty deep understanding of color science.

DT is like a car that you can only drive if you know how how to tune each part of the engine. Otherwise, you just drive something that sputters down the highway.

[hef19898 → busyant]

RAW files always looked washed out, by nature that is. If they don't, whatever software you use applied presets.

[Pomfers → hef19898]

Yes, before editing. All the other RAW editors I've seen, including the other FOSS editor RawTherapee, will automatically adjust the sliders to match the embedded preview JPEG. DarkTable doesn't do this, all my RAWs load in looking really strange.

[hef19898 → Pomfers]

You can set presets, I don't. Because the jpeg version doesn't have to be the "right" version of the photo (there actually is no such thing as right, hence my preference to start from a pure raw file).

[RobotToaster → hef19898]

As Pomfers says, it doesn't match the camera defaults, something that every other RAW processor seems to do. For my workflow the camera settings are usually 90% where I want.

[BeetleB → RobotToaster]

> it doesn't match the camera defaults, something that every other RAW processor seems to do.

Actually, none of the RAW processors I've used (both paid and free) match my camera's defaults (2 different cameras). The paid one even had a dedicated page explaining why so that they could direct newbies to it.

There are a lot of cameras out there, and you cannot expect developers to figure out the curve to match the camera for all of them. That's why these SW let you specify your own default curve.

[hef19898 → RobotToaster]

That's why I shoot both, RAW and JPG. If the JPG is fine, I use that (after sensor spots and so on).