

Feel free to turn on your highlight over exposure guide and shadow under exposure guide. Spend time getting the exposure correct as it makes everything else easier when it’s accurate. Make sure that firstly you adjust the ( 1) “lens correction” and the ( 2) “exposure” setting. Start your initial edit from “lens correction” on the Quick Access Panel. The first thing you’ll need to do is ensure that Darktable is set up for a scene referred workflow (this is the way Darktable is headed, the other workflow is display referred), don’t worry for now about what they mean, we will tackle this later. You can use the base curve module in Darktable to replicate a camera type, but moving forward it looks like Darktable is moving away from this approach, so here’s my little technique to set things up for editing. I know it’s a strange thought for some of us, but I think at some point, many of us have wondered how we get images close to the jpeg just to give us a head start. I decided to write this article to help those many people who feel that they can’t get you a starting point similar to their jpeg images that they get straight from camera. However, when people start learning Darktable, they find it hard to to get a good workable starting point.

It’s powerful and has many features that even paid software doesn’t have. Darktable is the go to free photo editing software for many people.
