Dull Images after importing

Thank you all for this interesting discussion and useful tricks. I’m sure the more I know DT the faster I’ll get better results.

To reiterate - I’m talking about OOC jpegs as a STARTING POINT, not the end result. Sometimes these images look good, sometime they are not. In any case I like to have something more closely resembling the real scene than a flat image. I guess for more experienced users it is the other way around, maybe one day I’ll be there too :slight_smile:

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@tankist02 It’s a matter of familiarity for sure. But try to think of it this way: darktable gives you a starting point that usually opens more possibilities than a starting point that has already pushed you in a certain direction.

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+1. My default processing is to scene-linear, and I go from there. I’ve had a few images that looked fine just there, no further work.

Starting with the OOC JPEG look may have already done things like driving highlights into oblivion, so you end up doing things like highlight reconstruction on an image that maybe didn’t need it.

I had a short period a few years ago when I shot Raw+JPEG. I’m going back and reprocessing most of it to have raw-derived proofs, and I’m continually amazed at how better the proofs look than the original JPEGs.

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Thanks for this simple introduction to the usefulness of color balance RGB presets. I am a fairly experienced DT user , but have not yet become comfortable with the color calibration and color balance modules. They bring a complexity level in that takes time to master. Luckily I enjoy learning the ins and outs of DT.

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