Post #4349405

2026-08-03 06:57 UTC

Ahhh I really don't manage to learn photo editing. I love taking pictures, but then when I try to process them in Darktable or RawTherapee, what I end with is always worse (to my eyes) than the JPEG out of the camera body, it's so frustrating. And I'm not used to not managing to learn something I dedicate myself to. It doesn't really bar me from taking pictures; I enjoy the process, and often the camera body JPEGs are good enough... but I want to do better than good enough, and to get full control on the final render. There is just a lot of untapped creative potential here and I want to exploit it. If you have any recommendation for tutorials or courses about that, I'm really interested; just fucking around with the tools do me no good. Only two requirements: It has to be for something that can run on my Linux system. (I don't have anything else.) The main tools I know are Darktable and RawTherapee but I'm open to other suggestions. I'd prefer free software but it's not a hard requirement as long as it supports Linux and doesn't cost an arm and a leg or run on a subscription model.Most tutorials about photo editing are in the form of videos, which makes sense since it's something very visual... buuuut I really don't like videos as a media for learning stuff. I find the huge majority of them too slow and not dense enough (it's almost painful to feel my brain having adjust down its processing speed to match the video and being spoon-fed one tidbit of information at a time at a rythm that isn't mine), and also too linear (compared to a text where I can search, skip, skim through etc.) If you want to recommend video tutorials or youtube channels to me, please send me some that are dense, technical, to the point and well structured. I wouldn't mind paying a bit of money for some course or training, if it's really good.

Replies (2)

@siblingsofthevoid@void.lgbt 2026-08-03 08:33

@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).

Open ##4349403
@zwarf@social.anoxinon.de 2026-08-06 08:16

@miranda_blue@eldritch.cafe 1/2 I was a professional wedding photographer for eight years and three of them I worked exclusively with Darktable. I also tried Rawtherapee but the recent development of Darktable is impressively good. Before I switched to Darktable I already tried for one year but never got the results I expected or wanted, especially compared to Lightroom which I was using before. For me all of this changed when I started to understand how to create my own color profiles.

Open ##4410869