I think this is key. The darktable manual right now is very much like the manual you get with your camera. The camera manual tells you what all the settings do, but it doesn’t help you with how to approach your photography and take better photos. Similarly, the darktable manual doesn’t really help you learn how to approach editing of a particular photo. Arguably, that’s not the job of the manual, but these kinds of resources need to exist.
If we look at some of the commercial software out there, there are lots of tutorials on specific techniques: “How to sharpen in x”, “How to make your photos pop in x”, “How to colour grade” etc. Then there are tutorials on specific genres of photography: “Portrait photography in x”, “Create stunning landscapes in x”, “Better night photography…” etc. These goal-oriented how-tos are wildly popular and very useful (the good ones at least).
The darktable series by Bruce Williams is excellent and essential viewing for new users. But it by and large still takes a similar approach to the manual, i.e. “this is what each module does”. Bruce has done some more workflow-based videos to help with a particular photography style, but there are not many of these tutorials out there in the wild.
So why aren’t there? I have a feeling it’s simply that there aren’t enough experts at darktable. I spend a lot of time on here and on the Reddit and Facebook darktable groups, and almost everyone is still learning how to use it. After two years of using darktable myself, I still feel I could only do basic tutorials, and even then it would probably be a more “drag this slider until it looks good” approach, because I couldn’t explain when to use Bilateral grid or Local Laplacian Filter, for example. I simply have no idea.
Which brings me to my next point, which is the UI. The addition of more tooltips in recent builds is a big step forward, but they are still very technical, and many tools don’t have them. darktable is excellent for the sheer amount of options it offers the user, but of course this can be overwhelming. I would welcome more goal-oriented tooltips of the type “Adjust this to boost x”, “Turn this down if you see halos” etc. I know this could be very tricky, but I’m just wondering how we can help demystify some of the more obscure labels like “RGB Euclidian Norm” and “Bias correction”.
Incidentally, i wonder if the “Invalid” label in the color calibration module should just be removed. It seems to always scare people until they come across one of the threads that tells them not to worry.