[cetra3]

I use Darktable quite extensively for underwater photos, but keen to try Ansel out and see if it's less friction.

An example of friction in darktable:

- I have an external strobe which means I have to put the exposure down to its lowest when shooting, otherwise everything is washed out. Darktable in newer versions has "Compensate camera exposure" on by default, which washes out all the images until I click it off. I'm sure there's a way to make this checkbox disabled by default, but why can't it accept what comes out of the camera?

- No favourites: there used to be a way to have all your panels in a favourites tab. This was great as I usually only use a handful of modules that I use. It's gone in later versions

- The "color balance" panel, not to be confused with "color balance rgb", it's not in any of the default tabs but useful for saturation adjustments. Why are some of these useful modules hidden? Shouldn't all modules be available by default. The only way you can get to it is by searching.

- White balance: there are now two modules and it warns you if you adjust one or the other: "white balance" the standard one on the "base" tab and "color calibration" tucked away on the "color" tab. Both modules are turned on by default, but if you adjust one or the other without turning one off it has a big red warning.

- One upgrade decided to reset export settings, and so my EXIF data was stripped out when exporting. It took me way too long to figure it out.

[jillesvangurp]

You can create a preset for the exposure module and define rules when it kicks in. For example based on the camera manufacturer, focal length, iso, etc. I use that to increase the default exposure compensation with my Fuji. I deliberately underexposes to prevent highlights from clipping. So I usually want a +1.25 exposure compensation. Likewise, you might want denoising on for high iso files.

You can organize modules into profiles and simply hide all the ones you don't use. The default profile hides some of the deprecated or display referred modules. You can change this.

White balance indeed has a deprecated variant for display referred and a scene referred one that works completely different that you typically use together with color calibration (which is where you should do most of your color correction, including color temperature changes). The reasons are mathematical and beyond me to explain properly (Aurelian does a great job on his Youtube channel). It boils down to not throwing away the baby with the bath water in terms of rounding errors accumulating and switching color model (to the one used by your display) too early in the pipeline. It might look pleasing but then it bites you when you want to tweak tone or do other things. This is the whole point of working with the scene referred modules.

Having all the legacy modules around is indeed somewhat confusing and Aurelian solves this in Ansel by hiding all the deprecated modules now. They are there for legacy files still.