darktable is not intended to work automatically, but to provide users a full control over the picture.
“Good looking” is something that needs to be defined clearly. Eastman Kodak have conducted many studies over the past 50 years to define a middle-ground for “good looking” pictures, because film emulsions do at once what is split into steps in darktable, without any control given to the user (except the exposure).
The problem we have in darktable is that any camera manufacturer works under different assumptions, and we don’t know them. For example, if they provided the dynamic range of their picture and their grey point, the input parameters in filmic could be set automatically from the EXIF. But they don’t. So here we are.
By the way, the base curves are reverse-engineered on non-synthetic pictures and contributed by users for what it’s worth. No quality control is performed before including them and some of them are really over-baked.
In my opinion, playing the violin should be easy. Just put your hands on the instrument and you should have a good sounding Paganini as a starting point.
How does that sound ?
I don’t know where the assumption that photography should be easy come from. That’s a craftmanship like any other. Just because computers are involved and technics are hidden under a GUI doesn’t mean you can spare yourself the learning curve. It takes 10-15 years to train a musician, 5-10 years to train a painter, you want to be a photographer in what, 15 s. ?
If this is what you think, what you are looking for is photography for the masses, and that market is covered by Kodak disposable film cameras, iPhones and Fuji OOC JPEGS. darktable is not the right tool for you. It is an instrument to let you express your visual creativity. Not a juke-box to loop-play old tunes.
But that comes at a cost: more advanced editings are pretty much voided by the drawbacks of the base curve (blacks crushing, over-saturation, limited shadows recovery abilities, etc.). I suppose the question you have to ask yourself is : “do you want to go fast or go far ?”.
You don’t get a dull image, you get an image with raised luminance that retains the original colour ratios, assuming you will manage those colour ratios yourself in a way that suits your photographic style, because it’s not the place of the developers to decide for yourself what is a good looking picture.
That’s the next step indeed. But iterative design needs iterations… Stay tuned.
No, you got it wrong.
Tone equalizer, filmic, colour balance, RGB curves and RGB levels are modules using scene-linear RGB encoding to apply transfer functions to your picture, while most of the darktable’s pipe uses Lab.
Scene-linear RGB has 2 wonderful properties :
- blurs applied in it don’t produce halos, which means the blending masks softening will behave flawlessly,
- it is possible to reproduce any kind of optical filter effect in a physically-accurate way, with minimum side-effects no matter the intensity of the adjustment.
As a consequence, the linear RGB tools allow you to affect separately the luminance and the chrominance, so editings become more predictable. It is advised to use them together because they form a consistent set of tools intended to work together.
The main drawback of the Lab modules is their usable range of settings is quite small, and you get ugly results real fast when you push the settings a bit far, which means bad model. Also, pushing the luminance in Lab doesn’t hold its promises to keep the chrominance as-is, you will witness weird desaturations with muddy blue colour shifts.
You can still use whatever Lab module you want with those RGB tools. Just be aware that they may mess with the linearity of the signal, so the properties of the scene-linear RGB may be voided after you cross an Lab module. But the pipe has been redesigned so Lab modules come last, so whatever module you use should get its expected input if you don’t reorder the default pipeline.
For those who speak French, I just wrote an article about that the last night : https://darktable.fr/2020/01/darktable-3-rgb-ou-lab-quels-modules-au-secours/ (DeepL does a pretty good job at translating it).
As usual. All the sharpening modules work in Lab anyway (which is not good).