Hello @xdodo, I talk about Art and RT here. You can, but you don’t have to, use many tools to achieve a certain effect, that is: a correct and pleasing raw conversion. To give an example for Art, I manage to set the exposure right for most of my raws with just the Tone Equalizer and the Contrast slider in the Tone curve tool. I add some Saturation, activate the Sharpness tool and I’m done.
Wedding pictures are often made in a limited couple of lightning conditions: inside (church or town hall, the actual wedding), outside in a park for some glamour like photos, outside during the garden party and inside or outside at night, when people are dancing.
In Art and RawTherapee you can make profiles for each of these situations. Take one raw, edit to taste and save that profile with the name wedding-inside for example. All the shots made in that situation can be treated at once by applying that profile to the shots made inside during the wedding. Of course this is never 100 perfect, but works very well as a starting point after which you only have to adapt exposure or contrast for example.
This way you can treat 1000s of shots in a minimum of time. I use this procedure since years (first with RT, later with Art) for example concert photography.
I agree that these two programs do have a certain learning curve (where Art is by far the simplest). Now that you are retired, I suggest to take some time to have a closer look at Art, or RT if you like (or even Darktable, it’s a capable program as well, but has an even steeper learning curve imo).
Regards, Paul.