Photography

Personally, I found Darktable to be the by far best raw editor I've ever used, and I used quite a few.

I used to think, that digital editing was hard and that I was quite bad at it until I tried Darktable. Darktable is easier and it gives you more consistent and predictable results than any other raw editor. Reason is that other raw editors basically just try to make it look good on the screen and then apply any transformations on top of the "good-looking" copy (Display-Referred workflow), which leads to unpredictable results. I can speak from experience when I say Darktable saves me countless hours in my job. Software really makes a massive difference in your photos and workflow and Darktable's FOSS. So no harm in trying. Yes, I'm shilling Darktable hard because it is so good. Believe me, if you ever had to do any sort of advanced editing in Lightroom or Capture One, you know what I'm talking about when you try twisting the programme's arm into giving you something acceptable and then trying making it look consistent with other pictures.

Best example is highlight recovery. Most programmes don't do real highlight recovery. They just give you back what the camera has already recorded, but have deliberately thrown away to give you a good looking copy right when you load the image the first time. Thanks to applying a curve first, and then everything else on top of said base curve. So if you continue to multiply on top of other transformations, you'll essentially multiply more and more errors, and it will really show.

For starting out, stick to the predefined workflow and modules and work away. There's your active modules and then you can add more modules to your active ones. There is a basic workflow when you load every image that gives you a good-looking result, but thanks to everything being exposed to you, the user, you have full control of all of it. Each module completes processing and hands off the result to the next module from bottom to top. So you always know what is going on in your raw workflow and in what order, which is very important. Funnily enough, other raw editors mostly don't tell you what's happening in what order, so you kind of have to make a guess, and just try and see what you get. It doesn't have to be this way, it can be better. If you want to go really deeply into raw editing, read the excellent manual. But if you just want to keep it surface level, that's alright as well. Just stick to the predefined modules and their order and you'll be golden.

TLDR: Darktable good.

Edit: Fixed typo.