We have a category called “Play raw” where you post a raw file and people will edit it and share the sidecar file. You can take that sidecar file and load it, then see the settings for a particular edit. You can explore that edit, turn the modules off and on, fiddle the sliders and see how things change. Its a nice way to learn.
RawTherapee has a feature to apply ‘auto matched tone-curve’, which may get you closer to in-camera JPG quickly:
However, the point of raw development is usually not to mirror what the camera does.
You may also want to check out ART (a ‘fork’ of RawTherapee), praised by many.
The quickest start to darktable is probably this: image processing in 3 modules. Note: ignore step 4, as the default version of filmic, v7, does not have that feature; instead, try dragging the highlights saturation mix slider here:
Okay, I’ve summarized everything you’ve told me and I’ve got a lot of things to read, videos to watch and things to test.
I will do this and come back later.
(I need to read about the licenses before I publish a RAW in the Raw Play, i want to understand this part first.)
Thanks, i’ll be back later!
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Hell this is amazing, your .xmp file made the RAW look pretty much like the JPG original, this is so cool!!!. I had to reset the color calibration module but there is an error in it now. The image looks pretty good!!! It’s ready for further enhancements.
Thanks very much for this help, it’s improving my moral quite a bit. 
I’ll study the modules you’ve modified in priority.
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Mode: append / overwrite is for pasting the stack, not for loading it from a sidecar or JPG. The latter always overwrites any previous stack.
mode
This setting defines how the paste actions behave when applied to an image that already has a history stack. In simple terms the “overwrite” mode deletes the previous history stack before pasting, whereas “append” concatenates the two history stacks together.A copied history stack can have multiple entries of the same module (with the same name or different names) and pasting behaves differently for these entries in append and overwrite modes.
A peculiarity is that:
Note: If you use the “copy” button (copy all safe modules) followed by the “paste” button (paste all copied modules), the paste will always be done in overwrite mode, regardless of the setting of this parameter. Similarly when performing the same operation using keyboard shortcuts.
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Oh… 
I’d forgotten about that. Thanks for disentangling my (well meant!) advice! 
Darktable has an interesting approach with white balance. The actual WB module basically does the ‘heavy lifting’ to bring the image to a standard ‘reference’ white balance, then the more accurate and flexible colour calibration does the rest.
The error appears when the two modules are not in the normal relationship to each other. I’m not that well up on the current finer points, and am not quite sure why the error is appearing for you, unless you adjusted the white balance in the actual white balance module.
I may have have unwittingly done something weird in my edit I suppose 
…
That’s great to hear 
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions! As you will have gathered I’m no real expert on darktable - I just use it 
(extensively…)
Just to add - the tone equalizer is pretty powerful for dealing with this. Start with trying the presets, then experiment 
Seems like this is a success today.
A. I checked your modules and the white balance really is the most important of the bunch to get out of the green swamp.
B. Then I reloaded the original image without any custom .XMP. Then I added the custom modules to recreate something fairly similar to the original JPG. But now I clearly see that i WILL do better then the camera.
TOP 1 priority: White balance and Exposure
Priority 2: Color calibration, Color equalizer, Sigmoid (Tone equalizer I know that one, yea, it’s very powerful)
Priority 3 (Fine tuining I guess): Color balance RBG (I don’t fully understand this one), Diffuse or sharpen, denoise (I like denoise a lot)
This is my result, my head is out of the water now. (the improved image on the right)
https://i.imgur.com/RzYXKy3.png
The possibilities now!! 
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Canon supply software for editing their images and it is the most likely to reproduce the out of camera JPG look. If you like the out of camera JPG look then maybe just use that image. I am unsure why anyone would want to put a lot of effort into recreating the same look from a Raw file when the camera has supplied the JPG that they like. I presume Canon don’t supply a linux version of their software but maybe it can be run on linux with wine.
You have been given some good advice on this forum and I look forward to you putting an image on PlayRaw. Also, when you become experienced you can do a better edit than the out of camera JPG 99% of the time.
I can answer something, when i spend some time behind the camera, working the manual settings, the result I like is based on a couple of samples I see on the LCD of the camera. I already did a part of the job behind the camera, that is why it was such a big deal to get a RAW that is so far apart from the LCD image.
It’s not really to reproduce the result of the camera but to get back at that starting point, to enhance further from there. I decided to learn Darktable (and RAWTherapee soon) because the images from the camera are not 100% to my taste.
BUT the result of the camera is a pretty good start.
I learned a lot today, thanks for your help here all, I am sure I’ll have other questions soon enough. I see the potential to beat the camera now.
Calling this a day!
This is the wrong question…you are taking the view of many that the raw file is a super jpg …but it is not…in fact if you take several raw editors you are going to get a different starting point… Even the auto-matched mentioned above often over saturates even more than the jpg or it has several model options for the curve that give many different results…which will not be a match for the jpg but never the less could be great starting points for color grading an image. If you really like the jpg use it…if not and you need to manage dynamic range and or whitepoint or colors and the like then you have to enter the world of raw editing…the only other option for you might be to use the canon software… I could likely give you a raw that starts as close as you are going to get to the jpg and then you take that as the starting point for further processing in other software…
I understand what you are saying. I often see the JPG image as a good starting point. So I open the JPG in DT and take a snapshot. I then open the Raw file and apply some basic editing steps and compare the JPG snapshot. If I still prefer the JPG I analyse why do I prefer the JPG. It might be the exposure, color, contrast, saturation or something else. I then attend to these in the processing modules and 99% of the time come up with a superior image to the JPG.
BTW, if you use filmic in your Raw processing it produces dull colors that need to be boosted using the color balance RGB module. There are presets for basic colorfulness that help with this. On the other hand if you use Sigmoid instead of filmic you get more pleasing colors straight out of the box. It would be worth comparing the starting point given by filmic and the starting point given by Sigmoid and seeing which you prefer. The use of snapshots is very helpful when doing comparisons.
BTW, welcome to the forum and good luck with learning both DT and RT. The PlayRaw category is a very useful category for seeing how different people approach the editing of the same image.
Honestly? Two years of on and off fiddling. But my goal was not to replicate Canons default rendering (which I find rather lacking). The shortcut solution is to create a 3d lut of the Canon JPEG rendering.
If you want to learn basic modern processing in dt, I would start here:
This 
is the real pressing problem IMO. The goal should be to have unified rendering between camera makes and models. This is something I tried to address in this thread:
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I used Darktable for 7 days now and… tried to modify many RAW images, to generate nice backgrounds for my computer at the job… I always come back to my JPGs images and simply crop the section I want + extract to JPG or TIF (Especially for the low light images). Many of them with absolutely zero effects applied using Darktable, except for the crop module. 
Cropping the parts of the image I want.
For daylight pictures I use some DT modules but very little modifications that a JPG can handle pretty well IMO. That EOS T7, seems is a bit better with low light images then day time.
Yesterday I extracted like 10 output of a single image using DT, I was thrilled with the result then this morning, these images looked unnatural, I tossed them all in the recycle bin. lol.
Perhaps it takes much more practice to have real success at improving images, but so far I look at my best JPGs, I don’t feel like they need any modifications.
Weird but interesting.
Once I took a shot of a Hare we have here and it was underexposed, DT did a great job at correcting the image to have a MUCH better view of the animal. The goal was different then taking a nice shot to make it even better.
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I’m of the opinion that if you’re happy with the jpeg, why not use it. As you mention, when things like under (or over, to some extent) exposure happen, the raw really helps, as it does if making bigger colour changes, but after all, the camera makers put considerable effort into making a nice jpeg, just for some people (like me often 
) to throw it away in favour of the raw.
It’s a good thing though to keep the RAWs if you have the storage space, as you may find you want to return to them in the future
I’ve been at it seriously -ish for almost 3 years now and while I’m often content with what I can do definitely not always and I’m still learning new stuff from others who do it better…
Whether raw is worth the trouble depends also on the kind of subjects you like to photograph. Studio work (where you can control the scene contrast) or low-contrast scenes are much easier to get correct with in-camera processing than high-contrast scenes. High-ISO is another area where raw can have distinct advantages.
And you may just want to modify the image in ways that are hard to do in-camera (colour grading, local edits, …). When you make potentially large changes to the image, the linearity and higher bit depth of raw make a difference.
Yes, when you start with raw editing, you may have to struggle to get a pleasing result (note I said “pleasing”, not “resembling the camera jpg”, I happen to prefer less saturation and contrast than my camera forces on the jpegs).
Hi,
a little late probably, but looking at camera support | darktable, there is not support for WB presets for your camera as of now.
As a workaround, you can try converting your RAW files to DNG, using dnglab for example. I know it shoud work just fine, a friend has the same camera and also has to convert the cr2 raw files to dng first to be able to edit his pictures with darktable
The presets are only important if you ever want to use the ‘legacy’ white balance mode with one of the named values like ‘daylight’, ‘cloudy’ etc. With the ‘modern’ (white balance + color calibration) mode, it’s completely irrelevant; even with the legacy (white balance only) mode, it’s just missing named presets, colour accuracy in not compromised.
Exactly. And this seems to be the issue, making the pictures look “green” or “dark”, and converting them to dng was the only way so far to be able to edit them.
Pictures taken with auto WB with this camera seem to work just fine.
If there is another solution, I’d love to know it. Would help my friend avoind thehasle of converting them first, before any editingand keeping multiple files in different fortmats.
But darktable would use the multiplier recorded in the exif, would it not? I do not own such a camera, and always use auto WB with all my cameras, but it was my impression (maybe I was wrong) that having the presets only influenced the availability (or not) of the list shown here:
Could you or @Pic-N3p please upload such a problematic CR2 raw file here?