Why is darktable making my pictures crap?

[Red Squirrel]

I used to use a program called Raw Studio, and it had the best work flow and I liked everything about it. Problem is, it's not available on Mint 18. I don't know why, they just never chose to include a package for that distro. So I've been using Dark Table as that one has a half decent work flow. But I noticed today how it really bodges the quality of the images.

Check out this horrible jpg artifacts. This was shot in raw:



The exact same file in Raw Therapee. (downside of that program is it lacks proper workflow management so it's why I can't use it)



These are without making any changes to the pictures, just opening them.

Oddly this is probably the very worse I've ever seen, been using Dark table for a while now and other than high noise compared to Raw Studio I've never seen this much jpg artifacts before. Wonder if it's some kind of update that caused that.

Any other programs in Linux I can try, or a way to make this one better? I really need something with proper work flow as I tend to take lot of pictures then pick the best ones.


Oddly, the first one resembles more of what is in camera as far as darkness goes. It was shot at about 10s (I forget what I had set it to) and 100 iso with F3.5.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Ok so think I figured it out. It seems that by default it applies a "base curve" and it actually makes the pic quality worse than if I adjusted it myself. If I reset this curve and retouch it's way better. I also found an option under "show global preferences" (gear on top, somewhat right area) which lets me change the default curve to "per camera". The one it picks for my camera is also not as bad as the default. Not sure how to change the default, or how to change any of them, but when I'm in edit mode I can still reset them on the left where the modification steps get stored.

Kind of glad I found this as I was finally starting to get used to the workflow of Darktable so did not really want to switch programs.