I switched to darktable from Lightroom a few years ago. And I’ve been following (and supporting) @anon41087856’s awesome work for a while now.
I highly suggest enabling the modern workflow and forget about the rest. It works even more differently from what you might be used to in Lightroom, but it’s worth it. The results speak for themselves. With darktable 3.4, it’s even better and simpler to get to a great image from a raw.
To get there, to go the preferences, make sure the following are set:
- under processing:
- auto-apply pixel workflow defaults: scene-referred (this says to use filmic rgb based workflow)
- auto-apply chromatic adaptation results: modern (this means that you want the “whitebalance” module set to D65 (which you’ll generally ignore) and that the actual color balance will be managed in the
- turn off sharpening (optional; I use “local contrast” & “contrast equalizer instead”… although contrast equalizer is way more advanced than just sharpening… you can just use sharpening, of course)
Then, in the darkroom view:
- click on the ☰ icon and select “workflow: scene-referred” (this will give you the recommended, modern modules to use and hide the deprecated and older modules… you can search if you really want some of them, or even re-add specific ones… but > 90% of the time you’ll have the set you need in this preset)
This will give you a few module categories: What’s active (there are always at least a few modules active), and 4 groups of modules (either on or off) that work on the images in different ways. Going from left to right, those are:
- Active modules (already mentioned)
- Base modules. This is the “bread-and-butter” that you’ll use to get a photo roughly where you need it. It has exposure and dynamic-range related stuff.
- Color. Every image will use color calibration (for the white balance). The other two are to tone the image.
- Correct. This has shaprening, denoise, retouch (for intelligent cloning/healing, etc.), and such.
- Effects. You usually won’t use this at all for most photos, unless you dive into contrast equalizer.
OK, now here’s how you’ll probably want to edit most photos:
- Exposure.
- Get it about right. You can “cheat” and use the eyedropper on the part of a scene that should be right, such as drawing a box around someone’s face or if it’s a landscape, a bit of the landscape (minus the sky a lot of the time).
- You can just bump it up or down using the slider until it looks about right too. Forget about parts being too bright (as you’ll fix it in filmic and/or tone equalizer)
- If the image has dark parts that go to complete black, you can adjust that in the exposure module’s “black level correction”. Just bump it one click of the scroll wheel at a time, as it’s super-senstive, usually.
- Adjust highlights and (sometimes) the dark tones in filmic.
- Defaults are usually fine enough. You might be able to even skip touching filmic in some cases.
- If highlights are blown, you may want to use reconstruct here to smooth them out and make it more natural.
- If highlights are indeed blown a bit, you might want to also visit the “highlight reconstruction” module (which is probably on by default, in the active modules group) and change it to LCh (a good default that makes the highlights fade to white) or Color (which often works, but sometimes has side effects). Clipping is usually not what you want, even though it’s the default. If you shot your scene correctly, you’ll usually not have blown highlights though. (But sometimes you can’t avoid it or have been a little sloppy. Speaking from experience.)
- Filmic has a look tab where you can adjust contrast & saturation… or you can do both of these in the “color balance” module.
- (Optional) If you want to make parts of the image brighter or darker, expand the “tone equalizer” module
- then visit the “masking” tab, click on the “mask exposure compensation” eyedropper icon, wait until the image preview is computed, click a second time
- adjust parts of image with your scroll wheel
- (Optional) “Local contrast”
- Adjust the color balance in “color calibration”. You can usually just use the eyedropper if it’s not correct already. (By default, it uses what your camera’s white balance was set to.)
- Denoise.
- Default is pretty good, especially if you had a profile match with your camera.
- I like wavelets and denoise the color more than the luma.
- Sharpen, if you want/need it. You can use the “sharpen” module or something like contrast equalizer.
You’re usually done. You can usually copy and paste this with similar photos taken at the same time and might need to adjust a little bit (like exposure and perhaps filmic).
This sounds like a lot, but it’s usually pretty easy and quick for typical photos (sometimes where you can just adjust exposure – if you even need to) and be done with the picture. Everything can be adjusted, but it might not even need to be. A lot of it depends on your camera and how you used it.
Note: With Lightroom XMPs, there is currently a Lightroom importer bug where darktable is a little bit too agressive on translating the edits. You may need to click on “original” in the history stack (on the left) in the darkroom mode, then “compress history stack”. If you have something mentioning curves or split-tone (both older modules, not for the scene-referred workflow), do it again. Then you’ll be at a good starting point.
But my biggest suggestions:
- read the manual
- watch @anon41087856’s videos
- read various threads here on the forum
- check out some of the play raw threads here on the forum and consider playing along (you can learn a lot of things – people even share their metadata and describe their techniques as well as a post export previews of their take on the images)