Good advice, I’ll take it.
To be honest, I can make a good edit in Darktable but I’m really struggling on some images. I’d say the thing I miss the most from Darktable is shaddows, highlights, whites and darks sliders. And I’m struggling with bringing back contrast after filmic.
On some images I can bring back contrast with tone eq right away. But on some images I just can’t seem to be able to do it, and when I’m getting close I end up messing it up and start again. I can also do it using a combination of modules but I wonder if that’s too messy approach? I don’t know what’s the most elegant way of doing it.
And with bringing up shadows and lowering highlights, that’s something that I’m only able to do with exposure module and much of masking. I miss shadows and highlights sliders from Lightroom a lot. But I’d like to learn how to reliably achieve the same with darktable.
Again, I can often do it, but it’s messy and hard. Because I find myself doing it by experimenting while I’d much rather try to have some established ways of doing things. Some repeatable procedure for let’s say bringing up shadows or lowering highlights and that I know exactly what I need to do to achieve the desired result except experimenting much.
And one my say, well just use a curve or something, there are many ways. But in my experience none of them can achieve the results that Lightroom can just by using two sliders. So they must be doing all sorts of things in the background and that’s what I need to figure out. So that I know for sure, if I want to raise shadows a lot but retain all the detail etc, this is the combo and the pipeline that will do that etc.
I’m the one for simple one click solutions, but I need to figure a few things out in Lightroom and Darktable to be able to work more efficiently, not like a blindly.