What do you have in your fav list and why??

OK so brand now to dt, only worked on 3 photo’s so far. I’m wondering what y’all who have more experience have in your favorite module and why?

TIA

James

Filmic - new addition, replaces base curve. Fine grained control of midtones, shadows, highlights. Brings saturation back into highlights and shadows

Crop and rotate - the most valuable tool! Get rid of any distractions around the edge of the frame & make sure the horizon is straight.

Tone curve - lab unlinked channels - global saturation and contrast control. Also change color of objects if necessary

Color Zones - awesome for tweaking specific colors

Equalizer - often use clarity preset. I shoot a lot of gritty, paint peeling type of scenes, and some local contrast makes the image pop wonderfully. Tweak until content, then back off the settings a bit. Easy to go overboard.

Retouch - get rid of little distractions in the frame.

Vignette - all my photos have the corners darkened slightly. I use the lightness mode and the blend at 12%

Spot removal - probably removing in favor of retouch… But it removes spots.

Exposure - bump the over all lightness of the image a bit. Useful with base curve and filmic

Lowpass - usually to brighten shadows a la Harry Durgin

Highpass - Sharpening a la Harry Durgin

Please note that if you’re new, there is no need to learn every module right away. Master a few modules and then add new ones as you need! Also make sure you get a good grasp of the masking, parametric and drawn, as this is what really sets darktable apart from other editors IMO

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Hi @Jokersloose & welcome!

I would say go through a lot of darktable tutorials,
and note what modules that are used. Also, after a while,
you will find that you prefer certain modules – those are the
ones to favour.

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

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@Jokersloose Favourite doesn’t mean easy to use. And depending on where the module is in the processing pipeline, modules can affect one another in various ways, sometimes drastically; e.g., flimic works well only when base curve is disabled.

I suggest that you start with the basics. Read about colour management (input and output colour profiles) and soft proofing. Learn how to read the scopes; e.g., histogram. Exposure, crop and rotate, vignette and lens corrections are basic modules that every raw processor would have. I could list more but I hope you get the idea.

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I’m watching a tutorial on YouTube now, once I’m done with this one I’m going to move to some of the other’s I have found. Because everyone has a different way to teach and I may not “get it” with one so going to watch a few.

I’ll look into the basic’s that was listed, thanks :smiley:

Quote myself:

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But no content added :rofl:

You can upload some RAW files here with a ‘playraw’ tag and a CC license. Other users will upload their results with many XMP files to take a look at.

Not sure how to do that, I’m really new to the digital photography world.

Just look around in the kategory processing with keyword playraw.

You will learn very fast. :slight_smile:

Yeah, just open a new thread, add the ‘play raw’ category, upload a RAW and give a license to edit the file. Like this:

Licensing suggestions can be found here: PlayRaw stuff to keep in mind. We licence because we want to respect the author’s work and also protect our community’s contributions.

I like to make sure the table is level and has all its legs, so to speak, right off the bat. So, rotate if necessary from “crop and rotate”, then if the perspective of the image looks off, apply the awesome “perspective correction” tool, then crop in “crop and rotate”. At that point, I have the image I want to play with.

After that, steal @paperdigits’s list.