Essentially, I hadn’t touched darktable for about a year. So I had forgotten some things. I had learned to live with Lightroom.
But there were always these annoyances: my phone camera had a broken import profile that only Adobe could fix, but didn’t. The aggressively desaturated highlights. The simplistic preset system.
I have now processed about half the photos from my vacation, and thereby relearned darktable. I re-shot my color target and re-created my Fuji film sims, this time with the new Nostalgic Neg and Reala Ace, and updated my film-sim-panel accordingly. I created auto-presets for all the small differences between my three cameras (phone, GR, Fuji).
And now everything is running smoothly. With these automations, darktable is almost as quick to use as Lightroom. Of course edits are still mostly click-wait-see instead of real-time. But that’s balanced by many small repetitive tasks that are now automated. Good stuff!