Post #4349403

2026-08-03 08:33 UTC

@miranda_blue@eldritch.cafe Okay, I’m simply gonna talk from personal experience, since I taught myself how to do it. Take raw photos rather than JPEG. the JPEG already has a color profile and loads of camera settings applied to it. It’s high quality, but not REALLY meant to be edited. Raw photos are just uncompressed sensor data, thus very easy to edit. Start with a goal for a specific picture. What do you wish to get out of editing? Do you wanna have a greyscale picture with only one color channel active? Do you want something extra vibrant? Do you simply wish to correct colors to make them look more like how they looked to your eye? start figuring out the controls for your specific thing. In Darktable my most used corrections are: Exposure correction, Sigmoid (for contrast correction) and the Color Equalizer (usually saturation). This is where you may get disappointed, but to properly color correct pictures, you need a decently accurate display. Doesn’t have to be perfect, but something that can be calibrated or is already decently calibrated from the factory is perfect. Otherwise you’ll end up correcting for the screen, rather than the picture. make sure to set your camera to the most neutral color setting it has. For my Nikon D5200 that is the “Neutral” setting. That means it applies as little color on its own, as it can. Don’t edit if you think the picture shows what you wanted to show. It makes no sense to correct something that you already like as is. As an extension of 6: try to prevent post processing by getting better pictures. I know this seems like a useless piece of advice but I’m going to tell you right now that most pictures I have posted on my account are unedited (It’s always marked when I edit). Taking better pictures is about understanding the lighting and your camera in such a way that you can get as close as possible to the desired result without editing (preferably you’d get it right the first time).

Replies (1)

@miranda_blue@eldritch.cafe 2026-08-03 09:08

@siblingsofthevoid@void.lgbt Thanks for the advice! About 1, I already take all of my photos in RAW + JPEG. In 99% of times I do nothing with the RAW and it just ends up taking space on my NAS. 2 is good advice. Most of my photography is low light urban photography, shot at dusk or night, emphasizing colored lights, light and color contrasts, arrangements of objects in the scene. Usually I'd like to emphasize the color contrasts, but I already thought that I could play with black and white more if the colors are not that interesting but the light contrasts and overall picture are still nice. 4 is a good point, actually, and I've no idea how good my main screen is for that; it's not a terrible screen but I absolutely did not choose it for that (it's a 4K LG screen from 2018, and at the time I got it to watch movies at home). I should check and see if I can do some sort of calibration. (And I've been thinking of replacing this screen with something more suited to my current usages anyway, though I don't have the budget right now.) About 6 / 7, yes, I agree with the gist of it. I still take many pictures I like (they are mostly on my other account, @miranda@queer.roboctopus.org - almost all of them are unedited) and the more I know and use my gear, the better I get with it. Still, I think some pictures that are no good out of the camera could be made into something I like. Also, I feel that for some sort of pictures at least, the RAW is more like a... raw material and the editing can get you really different (and equally good) pictures out of it. I'm thinking for example of what people do here, where someone gives a RAW and different people play with it and give their take on it: https://discuss.pixls.us/c/processing/playraw/30 It seems to be especially the case for landscape photography, which is not a genre I do much, but maybe I would try it more if I understood how to process them better. And finally, on a more personal point of view, it feels really intellectually frustrating to me to not to be able to do at least as good as the camera's automatic processing. It's good that it gives good results, but I wish I could understand the process well enough to achieve the same result manually. As it is, when I use the JPEG, the camera is making choices for me. Even if I agree with those choices, I wish I could understand them well enough to also understand how they can be tweaked and how different choices could be made. It would just make my hobby more satisfying, regardless of whether or not I would get better photos out of it.

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