Every user? I spend 2-3 seconds to get a decent initial result for my images, exception made for particularly difficult images or where I made an error taking the image. True, that’s with a style adapted to my type of images, so it’s “open the image, apply the style, take it from there”. I spend more time per image culling and tagging.
You want one or more modules active by default, so set up dt to do that. Don’t presume to speak for every user, you certainly do not speak for me.
I don’t know what others darktable users think, but my case was not as you describe.
I was bored of photography editing using other programs like CaptureOne or Lightroom, where you can only move slides. When I discovered darktable, I was amazed how much things you can do and control while developing a RAW file and how much to learn I still had. Thanks to darktable and this forum I have learnt a lot about photography and RAW development.
There are videos where you can learn how to fast develop images. For example: [EN] darktable 3.0 live - fast workflow for pros/time-constrained photographers - YouTube
And there is a very interesting thread, thanks to it I started to use massively shortcuts: Darktable speedrun: Stylish edits in 40 seconds
So I personally enjoyed the hours that I spent learning how darktable and the modules work and it made RAW development interesting and fun again for me. Now I have my default settings that I can adapt everytime for my taste 
If the default settings are so important for you, you can use LUTs, you can use the JPEG from the camera or you can use the old display referred workflow, maybe it fits better for you. Edit: or as @rvietor also said, you can use your own settings.
With a lot of power comes a lot of responsibility 
OK, I’ll try to express my (and many other people I know) opinion on the topic again. If I have broken logic on some point, please, point it out.
Let us consider the typical new user case. A user downloads the program, installs it and converts a batch of RAWs with default settings. Is his action correct? It works fine for all other programs from camera manufactures ones to third-party, including the most commonly used. And it always has been so with the darktable too. And now what does he get? The results look unnatural. So it works for any other program, besides darktable. What is the reason darktable acts here not like other programs? The benefit?
My conclusion here - most of the potential new users will stop using darktable at that point. Am I wrong? I already know such people who quit.
A regular photographer who uses darktable. For instance, on Linux. He downloads a new version and gets bad results. Is it as it was intended? Many of such people (as a photographer I know a lot of photographers) will stop using darktable. Some of them will go to the site, download the manual of 4.0 (which is in only three languages for now), read through it and find out there is no “getting started” with the description what he needs to do to get natural looking results. Is it as it was intended by design?
A user should know a program he uses, but the program itself should be user-friendly, shouldn’t it? Any learning curve has it reason.
A geek. There is no words at least in the introduction part of the manual (including workflow description) on the necessity of enabling the color calibration RGB module with the natural settings. Should he subscribe to some conference simply to be able to start using the new version of the program? Where is the explicit information any user needs to start using the new version of the program?
Anyway, besides knowing from somewhere the fact the color calibration module should be enabled (and it is not enabled by default) , any user should spend a good amount of time to get natural looking results. Why? What for? What is the aim to make any user make his own style? Any user.
If we look at base curves, simulating images from different manufactures, they are very close in shape and values. Their slope provides equivalents of perceptual contrast at changing of exposure. The reason of there similarity is simple - they mimic a human vision for a LDR scene. There can be some “decorations”, but in common case they all make natural looking result for a LDR scene.
What do I mean here? One can make setting, which produce natural looking result mostly invariant for camera model (providing we have an appropriate color matrix).
Of course, I’ll do a style which satisfy me. My enhanced color matrices are a part of darktable now and I always used a handmade base curves for my cameras. But I really don’t understand why not to enable some natural looking settings by default. It is simple. It costs nothing. It would suit the 95% of LDR photos and satisfy 95% of users. If somebody thinks some settings are better as a starting point for further HDR processings, such settings can be included as an additional built-in style.
I see what you mean, in a way. I can only say that for me, darktable did have a steep learning curve initially, but I’m not sure that ‘better’ defaults would really make much difference, to a user who wants to use the unique (I don’t like that word, but it’s what I mean) features that darktable gives. Anyway I’m only a mostly happy user - nothing more!
I get your point and I agree that a lot of information is not present in the manual. It’s almost mandatory to be part of this community to get to know darktable better. Anyway, it’s an open source project, so everyone can contribute to it 
Let me describe my workflow. Currently I mostly take photos for joy, not for living. But as I earned money from the photography too in the past, I can say the professional workflow doesn’t differ much.
Tomorrow I with my friends made a lot of photos from a pleasant location with a model. I’ll view or convert them with default settings and make subsequent choices with further adjustments. The most important part here is: 1. In order to judge, one needs the good natural looking starting image. And 2: My practice says - if the scene looks good itself and requires no tonal adjustments, the final image can get no additional adjustments besides the ones applied at the starting point.
So the good looking starting point is a must have. Of course, some images are HDR and require further “playing with”. Some images have missed white balance. Sometimes the exposure is bad and requires correction. But the most - the most of the images require “common” default adjustments until the final picture. Adding local contrast by the diffuse or sharpen or contrast equalizer modules can be required, or not, depending on the picture. But it is separate from “default” settings.
How about this? Even if you read the manual page-by-page, this guide only starts on page 11, and I’m not sure how it could have been covered much earlier. You have to have a pretty short attention span to have given up by this point.
Thank you, I’ve got it. The paragraph 5:
Saturation: Your image will probably not look very colorful at this point. You can adjust the global saturation of the image using the color balance rgb module. The “basic colorfulness” should provide you with generally-reasonable defaults, but you are encouraged to experiment further with these settings as required.
The phrase “Your image will probably not look very colorful at this point” is not correct. It should be like that: “Your image colors look dull and unnatural at this point. You should adjust the global saturation of the image using the color balance rgb module. The “basic colorfulness” should provide you with generally-reasonable defaults, but you are encouraged to experiment further with these settings as required.”
The difference is obvious and shows that module should be enabled by default.
And the same is for the default filmic RGB settings.
Here is the issue: some people like to start from a pre-cooked image and some people do not. I happen to prefer to start with the captured data and gradually build my way towards a final result (I’m even considering disabling filmic by default). We shouldn’t change our approach just because “everyone else does it” or just because “new users give up quickly without it”. Eventually those new users will become experienced and IMO the best way of learning is doing – pre-baked presets discourage learning.
What are the practical ways to keep everyone happy?
We could have lots of configuration options cluttering up our global preferences window (to enable/disable modules by default), but honestly we have too many of those already (I think we plan to remove the sharpen preference in the next version) and most of them would only apply to RAW images (so extra code to handle non-RAW).
We could turn things on by default and make others create a preset to disable them but then, even if they never use that module it would still show up in their history in the disabled state (because that’s how presets work).
Finally, we could leave most modules off by default and let the user choose – those that want the modules on by default can create a preset and those that don’t can leave things as they are, with a clean history stack.
The last option is the current state-of-play and in my opinion it’s the best (or least bad) of the three.
If you deal with many images (a typical model shoot, daily street photography or landscape trip photos quantity is about 100, or even more by an order of magnitude), a good pre-cooked image is a must.
So you write a style for your pre-cooked image. But no need to impose it on everyone else.
Or prepare one image, and copy the settings to the others with similar conditions.
I can say for sure for many photographers - and I know a lot of photographers - most of them prefer having good looking image out of the box. If you want, I can ask about 40-50 persons and white down here the voting results. They do not use darktable, but it is the common idea.
You see, even choosing from several “duplicates” requires their adjustment into some good picture to judge. And it all requires some “default” style.
Out-of-the-box means jpeg, not raw (the box is the camera, not darktable).
I’ve started and deleted about 5 replies over the weekend, none sounded very constructive. But abruptly I remembered my doctoral dissertation from 25 years ago on “software volatility”, the topology of how software changes over its life, and it occurred to me…
darktable is a fully functional raw processor, contains all the tools to convert raw camera data into pleasing renditions. And, most of those tools are state-of-the-art now, with no equal in most of the other available softwares, commercial or open-source. This thread is about configuration, how all those tools are ordered and parameterized, particularly a “default” configuration. It may be there is a need for the development and “marketing” of darktable configurations, named files that set up default ordering and parameterization.
I don’t know if/how darktable supports configuration files, but in my linux-oriented thinking, it’d be a directory, e.g., ~/.local/share/darktable/defaultconfig, and one could drop any file named *.cfg in that directory and darktable would start up ready to process files in the workflow defined therein. A few possiblities come to mind:
That way, anyone with fundamental understanding of their computer’s file directories can readily determine what default configuration in which their darktable will start. Heck, that file name should be displayed in the dt banner or somewhere; in rawproc I show the loaded rawproc.conf path in the About box.
My dissertation was about how to find the things that will change in a software’s life and making them changeable in the original design (spoiler: it’s the user-facing things that change the most, go figure). From a distance, it appears to me that darktable is readily organized to support such; really, this thread is not about changing darktable, its about configuring it…
I shoot RAW from my first digital camera - Minolta G500, which was enabled through the hack - a combination of buttons entered engineering menu, and RAW was there. And I participated in decoding its RAW file format. Since that time I have been shooting RAW only.
I’m pretty sure shooting RAW is not the goal itself. The goal is to obtain an image you (and others) would like. RAW allows one to obtain maximum from an image. It allows changing WB, exposure (even applying -EV to overexposed images: RAW is underexposed comparing to resulting jpg for about 1 stop), use tonal adjustments on a high bit image without banding etc. It allows using better image processing algorithms than the built-in camera are. It allows using LUTs for creative effects. And so on.
But. All the above mentioned actions are required if one is not satisfied with the image he obtained with RAW processing software “out of the box”. If one obtain results with some default RAW processing settings better than out of his camera, maybe spiced with some additional plugins like NR, local contrast, etc., all that images doesn’t require additional actions. They are already good. And they are so because one shot RAW, not jpg.
It might be possible to come up with a reasonable set of defaults that works well for your camera, but of course the same default might not work well for mine, so it’s hard to do default settings well. Even the default exposure setting is a compromise which might work well for some non-existent “average” camera but in practical terms needs tweaking for most real-life cameras. Default settings that are better than your camera can do are unlikely without a lot of effort, and afaik companies like Adobe only do it with significant effort and a lot of co-operation from camera manufacturers. Canon, for example, won’t even release the details of their RAW file formats to the FOSS community without a highly-restrictive NDA, so I’m not sure what we could do easily.
I understand that… actually I have a set of presets myself, one (or more) for each camera I use. Although recently, I’ve discovered that I can view and select the images in lighttable before doing any processing. Which means (in my case) that lighttable will display the embedded jpgs in the raw files. So I get to do my first selection using ‘pre-cooked’ images, then I start ‘developing’ that selection.
But I suppose if there was a default ‘out of camera’ look maybe I wouldn’t bother with this workflow.
On the other hand, if I wanted that I might just use RawTherapee, ART, or even… a commercial alternative (aaarrgh!)
All of which do give a ready-made ‘cooked’ look.
I guess what I’m saying is that while I do see the @BigSerpent 's point about a good starting point, and also it’s value for beginners, I’m not sure that it’s something that fits in to darktables ethos. On the other hand, maybe if darktable had an option be configured this way it wouldn’t be a bad thing, but then I’ve no idea how much time and effort from the developers would be needed to make a change that might have no great benefit for the majority of it’s user base.
Good luck!
This discussion in some form happens over and over. It always comes down to expectation for some. They look at raw files as JPG+. Without the camera that shot the raw there is no idea even what the JPG “should” be only the camera maker has that formula. Even if that information was available it would then have to be mapped to the DT tools. Others look at the image as a blank canvas and are happy to go from there. I think with the ability to use preset and styles you can speed up a custom starting point or go the base curve route even make your own. Maybe a point of capture for users to share their idea of good defaults for a particular camera might be of use and comfort to some.
Filmic is just another module. We can use it or not but it seems like people talk like filmic=DT rather than seeing it as just another module. I don’t apply it by default on purpose. I want to see and evaluate the image without any particular manipulation so that I can see what happens when I do apply it. I often find I can get better highlight details if I don’t have to use it but I also often like the global result I do get with it so I make a decision. I don’t think defaults will help that decision. Knowing the tools and how they behave and the various limitations and caveats is all I can do as the user. With use and practice the workflow evolves and the tools become familiar…
Do you deal with a lot of images in one sitting? Say low hundreds up to a thousand? I’m a medium type shooter who only gets into the thousands a few times a year but frequently deal with a few hundred images that should become say 25 finished images all in the same style.
I mention this because your post above makes it seem you’re more of a low volume image crafting type of photographer. Now just saving some styles, and personal default will enable a quicker workflow but understanding the issues people tackle is important to understanding what solutions are appropriate and why they ask for certain features and workflows.