Best workflow for stacking raw images to be developed in darktable

I did something similar recently, except that I was stitching a panorama instead of stacking. I’m not sure if this is the ideal way to do this, but it seemed to work well enough.

In Darktable I made a style and export preset to prepare the individual images. The style includes:

  • raw black / white point
  • white balance set to “camera reference”
  • highlight reconstruction if needed
  • demosaic
  • lens correction if needed
  • input color profile set appropriately for camera and working profile linear Rec2020 RGB.
  • output color profile set to linear Rec2020 RGB

I export the images as 16 bit linear tiffs, stitch those in Hugin, output a 16 bit tiff, and open that tiff in Darktable and do the rest of the processing. At this point color calibration is added to properly white balance the image.

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