@justAguy You might want to take a look at this example: darktable 3.0 for dummies (in 3 modules)
Getting good results should not be too difficult nor require a lot of work. Then again, it’s never fully automated.
This is almost true. ART and RT give you the option to get close to the tonality of the OOC JPEG. You can also start from scratch (called Neutral profile).
I’ve never used ART or RT. I was going on vague recollections of previous discussions. Thanks for the clarification.
thanks to all for the input!
I had a look at the “let’s create an SOOC-style” thread. At one point someone only used the ‘Color Contrast’ module (filmic disabled) to create a good match.
This confuses me. I thought, DT now operates in scene-linear? So I thought “filmic” does the conversion from scene-linear to RGB? Therefore I am surprised, that one can get a decent looking result without that transform at all.
Getting a “nice” result in DT is indeed rather quick. That’s why I am using it so far (according to a quick scan, I have used DT to edit ~20k images so far).
Yet, I still struggle to get colors that are “as nice” as in the SOOC jpgs. Dynamics are definitely better, but colors not so much.
That’s why I was searching for a “more like SOOC jpg start” to have the colors dialed in and be able to start from there.
color balance rgb will help with that a bit, but you have to understand darktable 3.6 user manual - darktable's color dimensions and have some knowledge of color grading (take a look at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GR1EGM4/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1 and https://www.amazon.com/Color-Correction-Look-Book-Techniques-ebook-dp-B00H9E3L4M/dp/B00H9E3L4M/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid= since those are recommended)
So one thing I would say is think of your Canon camera as a guy named Canon. Your jpg is not the ground truth but the effort of a skilled guy named Canon but with bias and color judgements made with the scene lighting to produce an image. There is another guy out there named Sony a guy named Nikon etc …each guy will have a skilled edit but not the ground truth… Chasing the edit of your camera thinking it is the ground truth will likely always lead to a lot of unnecessary effort. You will see it said over and over…if you want the jpg then just use the jpg but if you want to take that raw data and see what you can make with it…trust yourself and free yourself from the comparison and just make your edit…You have paid for a guy named Canon to edit your photos and spit out jpgs so use them if they are good but IMO chasing the jpg in raw editing is not productive and it has been debated over and over from many angles…to somewhat mimic the way an image is initially presented in ART you would need to use the base curve in DT as a starting point.
You attached the wrong raw I think?? Might want to delete the post if the young boy is family or you dont want the image up…
While you are absolutely right on “the overall edit”, I would argue that there IS a ground truth part on an image - e.g. if a red flower becomes a violet flower.
And while I would like to be able to influence e.g. the overall dynamic range/contrast/a.s.o. of my image, I would also like to stay color-accurate as much as possible while doing so and not have someone with a red t-shirt ending up with a blue one. 
So while there is no ‘correct’ contrast, there is definitively ‘correct colors’ - e.g. looking at a photograph of my color chart on my calibrated monitor.
haha - off-by-one… thanks for pointing this out…
(see - even uploading an image is too hard for me - should start with paper cutting or something…)
Okay so sure for color accuracy definitely there are things to consider. Using filmic can depending on the settings affect color significantly but you can also compensate. Also since you have one…DT has a feature in the color correction module to use your color checker to tweak color so you can try that. It basically does an analysis of the color after the input profile and after WB and then comes up with a set of channel mixer coefficients to correct the color to better match your color card…perhaps play around with that…darktable 3.6 user manual - color calibration
I tried darktable-chart, hoping it could result in a .dstyle with improved colors to start with. While the result perfectly corrected that chart-photo I used, the resulting .dstyle pulled the next shot from that chart (taken 5s later with like 10° difference in angle) totally into ‘blue’.
(repost, trying to get rid of the wrong upload)
Roaaarrr:
pic_9152.cr3 (46.0 MB)
pic_9152.cr3.xmp (10.9 KB)
My best try:
The speed to get a “good looking” result is not the problem. My problem is, that after taking kind of any amount of time to develop an image, on A/B comparisons people (I abused several friends with that) consistently choose the SOOC JPG as the ‘better looking image’.
Attached is a test-snap I just took for this thread. I added my edits (it took me around 5-10mins to get it as it is) as XMP and also attached the SOOC. I even fail to get the correct colors out of it (the SOOC is as good as it could get for a ‘ground truth’ - this is how it actually looks in real life.
The flower’s color is very off and the wall in general is too yellow. Fiddling with the ‘color calibration’ module (i.e. changing the white balance) pulls everything into desaturated/blueish too much.
At the end, I take a picture to “capture reality” as close as possible (I am not an expressionist :)). So if for every single photo, I have to carefully look at the SOOC JPG to not get completely off color, the whole process would be kind of wrong.
For comparison, this is “open & directly export without touching anything” using ART:
As I said, I am shooting RAW-only since ever and am a DT user for over a decade, but obviously I fail hard at even the most basic edit. 
Any help & pointers into the right direction are therefore highly appreciated!
Yes, exactly. And because he and his peers in Sony, Nikon, Olympus, etc. are skilled, their result, the OOC jpeg, looks good. Moreover, because they all work in corporations which goal is to sell more cameras and make profits, they tend to produce pleasing images, not necessarily realistic and accurate.
That’s why we all have found it difficult, initially, to produce a result “better” than theirs.
We need to learn and experiment a lot in order to “beat” them.
Especially with a RAW editor like darktable, which on purpose doesn’t give you pre-cooked look.
Other programs do, for the very same reason. But then you are just replacing Mr Canon/Nikon/Sony with Mr Adobe/Phase One/etc.
Agreed. Those companies put a lot of effort in their JPG creation. Which is yet another argument, one would like to start off with that - especially as you have paid for that JPG-generator. 
Well said. I have often thought that many new to the concept of raw images simply see the raw file as a better version of the jpg because it has more data and is a larger file size so when you edit it then it should be like the jpg but just look magically better… this can certainly be true to an extent but I think what gets missed by so many is the raw data is there to create and also to correct for lighting, wb, colors in a more dynamic and controlled way than you can with an 8 bit image with a baked in look. Often you end up with something that really is not much like the jpg but its a nicer image with tones and colors that you discovered in the image that you would never see or conceive of with a punchy crunchy jpg. Then this comes down to the goal of the photo in the first place. So if you are looking to be artistic raw is the easier choice but if you are looking at it as an archivist trying to reproduce what you saw or what you saw through your camera then maybe the jpg will be a better choice or at least a better reference…
Fuji certainly makes a living off of it…
Well, for photo-documentary purposes this is exactly as I like to think about raw files - more flexible jpegs. (For studio photography I do not care about the SOOC jpg look at all.)
I guess everyone had that jpg, which was unusable (e.g. shot against the light, where everything is basically white or black). Often, in those occasions the respective raw file can be developed into an “absolutely OK” image. Heck, often I do those shots on purpose, because I know, that I can rescue that and get exactly the details I want. I just have a hard time with colors on the R5 (that wasn’t a problem with my old camera).
I would also not care too much about having to start from scratch on every image - if I could at least get ‘correct colors’…
ART’s way of trying to match the embedded JPG at start (if you wish to do so) seems like an ingenious thing to do. I wonder whether such a functionality could be a module in DT.
I guess not, as this would then probably result in kind of a tone mapping. The best thing would be to have an auto-tuner that could translate the embedded JPG into a setting for color correction/filmic/tone EQ. Such a feature would be absolutely awesome and probably a big time saver for many.
Yet, for now I would be happy, if anyone could give me a hint on what setting I could rattle to match the colors to their real-world equivalents.
If you are interested about accuracy of color reproduction, then I guess using a color target and the color calibration module is the way.
I tried myself on the ‘color calibration module’, but if I cannot correct a violet flower to a red one, I doubt I can color match for a complete chart… That’s why I am asking here, what could be a path towards color matching my output to the SOOC JPG - hoping that I can learn to correct those off-color-defaults.
