Very first attempt with darktable

This does a nice job at fine scales!

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…

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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.

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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…

How I can load one of those sidecar files into my database?

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…

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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 :grinning:

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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/
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Excellent point that I had failed to consider when loading my .xmp files as I am always using the latest weekly windows insider program build.

We probably should watermark them when we post with the default dt watermark… or a custom one…

eg