Welcome…I would say the best advice I can give you is to throw away the concept of matching the jpg. If this is the goal then just use the jpg. The jpg is good to get an overall impression of the color and esp the exposure that you might want to keep in line with however the raw is not a super jpg or better jpg waiting to happen… there is a secret sauce in your camera that is applied. There are things for sure that can be done to attempt to match color etc but really the raw file is an opportunity to manage dynamic range in a way that you cannot with an already baked jpg. Also you can be more free with WB but if you obsess about matching the exact contrast and sharpness of the jpg you will usually feel like you are coming up short… I think many will see that often even though we like the look on first impression of a jpg that the more and more you work in raw you see that they are often over sharpened and over contrasted which can actually destroy aspects of the image, introduce artifacts and reduce possible outcomes for the final product…
If you search the forum you will find several discussions around this topic. This is esp true with DT as it is not the goal of the software to match or come out looking like the jpg and often it does little initially to the image and so many users apply their experience with other packages and judge DT as inferior… its not just different
I have to say that in this experiment I didn’t even downloaded and looked at the jpeg (apart from the initial quick look at the thumbnail in the lighttable). I just followed the process outlined in an introduction to darktable’s workflow, watched Aurélien’s basic photo processing for beginners in darktable 3.6 video, to have an idea of what to look when trying the adjustments (I have no real clue!), and edited as I liked it. I also played with the correct lens distortions and local contrast modules to finalise the image.
I cannot say I was dissatisfied with the result as soon as I finished. But then I imported the camera jpeg, and noticed my development was way less sharp than that.
Now I’ll try some of the modules for sharpening (like contrast equalizer or diffuse or sharpen), and see how they’ll affect my image. I will take the following consideration into account though.
Great! This is a fairly recent addition to the user manual and it would be good to have some feedback from the perspective of a new user. Was it fairly clear what you had to do? Is there anything that could be improved?
I think the manual is super well written. After years on commercial software and their useless documentation, it’s great to read a manual that goes beyond a mere description of procedures, and actually teaches you how things work.
As for improvement, I was a bit confused when setting the white and black points (but consider I am completely inexperienced, previously I had just played a couple of months with OM Workspace and Silkypix). I found Aurélien’s video helpful on this regard, showing the use of the picker for the white point, and setting the black point so that some details are still visible in the darker parts of his image.
Funnily enough, diffuse or sharpen is not included in the scene-referred workflow. I’ll start with the contarst equalizer, as sharpen is described as a legacy module in the introduction in the manual:
You may have to tone it back but try the dehaze preset of D&S module… to me its more of a sharpening effect rather than a dehaze you can always tweak with opacity and or iterations…
If you get in the habit of setting exposure to give you a well exposed middle grey then you have your anchor… The pickers esp the white one generally do a great job…The black one will sometimes go astray and need adjusted to your taste… How those sliders affect the image show well in the filmic DNR map graph…
As others have said do not try and just replicate the JPG. Aim for a image superior to JPG. DT has a steep learning curve, but the rewards are great when mastered. I teach DT to students and sometimes I get the students to load the out of camera JPG in DT and take a snapshot. Then I get them to open the RAW file and apply basic edits such as white balance, exposure and filmic (I usually use the auto tune levels option for most images). I also use the anti-aliasing sharpening preset in diffuse or sharpen module and the basic colorfullness preset in the color balance RGB module. I then get the students to use the snapshot of the JPG as a comparison to see if they prefer something about the JPG over there edit. It often is the color, saturation, contrast or sharpness. Then we tackle these issues using the appropriate module. 99.9% of the time we end up with a result that exceeds the jpg from the camera.
Good luck with DT. It is my favorite editing program.
Contrast equalizer can give some nice sharpening results, but the newer diffuse and sharpen is superior IMO. There’s a lot going on in there so it’s best to start with the presets.
I think when AP introduced the module he said not to use the sharpen slider and save it for tweaking a blur…but check it out… D&S is very complicated but a really nice basic sharpening can be had by opening the module and just using the sharpen slider… sure if you push it you can break it but if you don’t and then turn the module off and on you can see it can really sharpen without any need for diffusion settings…
Here in light table…select an image or images and apply… under History stack… you can also change the filter to all files and load an exported jpg as a sidecar and often…not always it will also have the steps…
One thing to bare in mind with the .xmp sidecar files is that if someone is using a newer (e.g. a dev version) dt version to you, the image may not come out right when you load the sidecar. Usually it will be fine apart from any new or different modules in the newer version. Just thought I’d mention it
Others have already answered your question. I don’t know if you are aware of the online manual, which has a built-in search function. https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.0/
And this is the work-in-progress version, which is usually more up-to-date, especially when it comes to new modules: https://darktable-org.github.io/dtdocs/en/
