I found this image a very straight forward image to process because of the nice capture. I have decided to include a list of processing steps that might help some people new to using darktable with the sigmoid module. But there are so many ways to process the image I am not suggesting this is the only way, best way or even the correct way to process this image. But it might be helpful to a person trying to get started with Dt and feeling overwhelmed by so many options.
Set exposure module. With this image having the target lightness set to 50 and using the picker for the exposure slider will give a good result.
Adjusting the sigmoid module.
a. Increase the contrast slider to 1.7 to add punch to the image.
b. Increasing the skew slider value adds contrast to the highlights and enhances the look of the sky in this image.
Apply local contrast. Just activating the module applies a default detail value of 125% which is fine for most images. With this image increase the details value to 137% for more contrast
Activate shadow and highlights module to brighten the shadow details and darken the details on the white buildings.
Use the color balance rgb module to add colorfulness to the image. The preset “add basic colorfulness (legacy)” can be selected for this image.
Activate the denoise (profiled) module to apply the required initial denoising of a RAW file
Apply the initial basic sharpening of the raw file by using the preset “sharpen demosaicing: AA filter” found in the diffuse or sharpen module.
This completes a basic simple edit and the image can now be exported.
