Ok, after doing some photoshoots, I tried to use RawTherapee, but however it doesn’t support .heif file, so I went with DarkTable, and I find it incredibly easy to get vibrant pictures. I actually like going just the bare adjustment.
I usually go with exposure, turn it on the maximum because the preview is just so dark, and use Color Balance RGB, and that’s pretty it. Occasionally, I look into other things if need to be.
Yes, darktable is truly worth the praise!
Having to max out the exposure slider for a file captured in HEIF makes me think there’s something wrong.
I’d recommend you try shooting raw if you want to edit, that’s where dt truly shines.
Yes, but it turns out there is more than just 4 EV, and there’s enough details anyway, according to my sight and the graph.
I’m using RAW, well according to the setting. Not sure if HEIF counts as “RAW”.
HEIF is a container format for photographic images, not a RAW format. It supports different encodings and different types of data like individual images, thumbnails, image sequences … and more.
The fact that the imported HEIF (which, as mentioned, is in no way the same as raw) is very dark could also be because it is encoded w/ a HDR PQ transfer curve, which has a very large range (1.0 is absolute 10000 nits). This is typically the case w/ modern Canon camera output I think…