@LateJunction My ah ha moment with the tone eq was to use two or three instances and to keep the adjustments of a reasonable magnitude. Even with a pretty good mask random dodging and burning I find messes things up. I often use one instance just to target darker regions and then add more instances for contrast or other adjustments…I found in this way I did not have to rely on the mask settings. I pretty much just use the simple tone curve preset. That seems to land my histogram in the middle even sometimes and then I just make a small adjustment. For bigger global changes I try to use blend modes to help. When I first started with the TE I saw some videos doing random adjustments but this rarely worked for me…someone may read this and say you just need a better mask …but I think I have heard others taking the same approach…thats my shared experience for what it is worth…Understanding what you want to achieve goes a long way and may be one of the hardest things (its hard for me) …For example @s7habo recently demonstrated how to mimic a LR preset. He explains how he looks at the image and how he attacks it and most importantly he reorders the modules to achieve that. When you take this sort of informed logical approach your are not constantly pushing and pulling image tones and colors …you attack one part and then the other and you reorder the module so that they don’t interfere with the process…However this is not the sort of thing you will ever get from a manual…Check this out…How to use Darktable to acheive stylized image effects - #5 by s7habo