According to your assessment, which modules are essential in your workflow and worth a more in‑depth study?
Below are the ones I always use in my workflow. Am I leaving out any important modules?
Tone Equalizer, I use it on almost every photo.
I’m not sure I would call all of these essential, but they are the ones I almost always use in my workflow:
Others that are used often are Tone Equalizer and Color Equalizer.
For me:
Note: I don’t mention nor use Demosaic, Denoise, Lens correction because I feed Darktable with preprocessed DNG’s from DXO PureRAW.
Sorry to say, but this is in my eyes a quite useless question. If you wait a while you will have named every single module. Everybody has it’s own favourites, every workflow is different and everybody has different needs.
All modules have advantages and disadvantages.
@Popanz I am sure that you are aware that the true title of this thread is within the OP post:
According to your assessment, which modules are essential in your workflow and worth a more in‑depth study?
But what you say is true as well. To add to the fun, there is always the no-op job. 
Edit: Even then, people cannot decide what is no-op. Raw with no cleaning pre-post-processing actions (e.g., sensor crop)?
True. I can get some very good results with a straight conversion from raw to many other formats with ImageMagick. I have no idea what all operations ImageMagick is doing on the way.
E.g.,
magick 7E4A3725.CR3 -resize 1920x1920 7E4A3725.jpg
A new one to me
Easy enough for a Foveonista, straight from the sensor no conversion to RGB and nothing else other than scaling and 2.2 gamma.
Please, a no op is just a series of 10001110111010011101101010111011111110101010101 – raw data straight from the sensor, no-operations applied.
No-op is playing Space Invaders in dt or Quake in vkdt.
I did some research, and ImageMagick uses dcraw for the conversion. I still don’t know what else it might do.
Partly true of course. But it is only a couple of weeks ago I would have been quite glad with these answers as I tried to get my head around what modules to chose making my own module preset.
And I felt quite insecure in the first weeks of using darktable how to start / which modules to use. Such a list would settle me down a bit.
But pretty soon you will not think about it anymore - till… somebody does something different the you do and you start wondering… and that is the fun for me.
Well, “necessary” modules depend on the kind of photography you do and how far you want to go with editing. E.g. I rarely need the retouch module, but I use tone equaliser quite a lot. I’d say that the essential modules to get a decent image are basically limited to what is loaded by default in one of the raw workflows, plus color balance RGB (with filmic at least). Most will want to add crop, lens correction and noise reduction depend on camera and shooting conditions.
As for making presets: while you are learning darktable, I doubt making presets (or styles) should be a priority.
After a while you will notice you use some modules all the time with the same settings. That “with the same settings” is rather essential when making a preset, as the settings are baked in. So a preset that you’ll be tweaking at every use is not all that interesting (imo).
Once you notice that, such modules are candidates for presets, and for inclusion in a style when you use combinations of modules like that.
Then again, I don’t use styles and presets much. Most of the time, it’s easier to just activate the modules I need when I need them. What I do find very useful is setting up a module layout to my taste: I don’t need three tone mappers all the time, so I keep only one in my setup. Same for noise reduction etc. Just the modules I usually use, in groups that fit my way of working.
rvietor proofs my statement. Anyway I would not only say it is depending on the kind of photography but as well very much on personal preferences. I make heavily use of presets but I have just two styles (for the starting point).
I hardly use tone equalizer. Simply because I don’t like it. On the other hand I know that many love it and this is valid as well.
I think if you start with a quite complex software it is often not easy. But you have to find YOUR way. There are enough videos and a manual to help you to find your way through. Saying this or that module is essential is too limiting for me and doesn’t necessarily help beginners, because other people have usually a different view on what I like.
Agree, to me more ‘essential’ then ‘essential modules’ is the ‘essential curiosity’ for how others see a picture and subsequently develop it.
That - among others - is why I like this mostly very friendly forum.
Kind regards, Jetze
