Thank you Marc, I had a brilliant time yesterday. Can’t believe I’m 54 already. Time is going much too fast.

I’ll stick with Darktable etc then 👌

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Well, I think most people edit their pictures, including myself, although I try to do it as little as possible.
Unless I specifically want to make it something more extreme.
But to be honest, having (many) followers is nice, but I’m not going to adapt my way of photographing or editing to it. Nowadays I prefer birds and deer in front of the lens, and I now have the right cameras and lenses for that. I try to keep the editing of those photos as natural as possible.
The most important thing is that what you photograph and how your photos look gives you the best feeling. This way you stay true to yourself and I think your work also has more value.
Belgium is a bit like the UK I think, nowadays we also have a lot of rain, so everything always looks a bit gray. But we can’t choose (not really) so we just make the best of it.
Thanks for your comment Vicki!

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I’m afraid editing software is way over my head. I tried Lightroom and Photoshop when I first bought my Canon DSLR in December 2010, but I’d quickly forget how I’d used it the next time I downloaded photos.

I concluded that I wanted to be a good photographer, not a photo editor. LOL.

Not that there’s anything wrong with photo editing, my brain just doesn’t want to play around with it.

Having said that, I do tweak my photos with the iMac’s basic photo editing in-house software. The retouching tool/slider is remarkable in the last 2 software updates (except for this morning). I love the way it can erase twigs in front of a bird in a tree.

I quickly discovered back in 2010 that fellow bloggers and followers didn’t come around to my online blog until I permanently increased the colour slider one notch.

Personally, I prefer more natural earthy muddy tones, but with my 2 DSLR’s colour settings slightly increased, everyone seems to follow. The light in Australia is very harsh and nothing like the softer light in Northern Europe or the warm golden light in Italy. My old photos from the mid 1970s made in the UK, especially Scotland, are terrible and I’ve thrown most out in the rubbish now.

I envied (and followed) a very renown Canadian professional photographer for years until the day he showed his original image and all the edits he did. I was sorely disappointed that his original was not really that much better than my own original shots, but he was an excellent photo editor and a brilliant writer. I’ve got 2 of his books and one e-book.

Just goes to show, skilled and appropriate editing has its place for all professional photographers now.

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Hey Mark,
I hope you had a nice birthday yesterday!
To be honest, advanced or even professional photographers like you will benefit more from Darktable, and probably even the Nikon software.
RawTherapee is a pure Raw developer, with everything you need to get the most out of Raw – there is still the option to apply film simulation in the form of PNG Luts, and there is color grading, but the focus is mainly on Raw to Jpg or Tif, if I want to further edit a photo afterwards.
This makes the interface less cluttered with tools such as Darktable or other advanced image editing programs.
So to simply develop photos as best as possible from Raw, Rawtherapee is fantastic, but if you want to apply more fancy things in one go, then you will be left wanting here.
Have a great day!
Marc.

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I really need to give RawTherapee a try again. I’m not sure if it has any benefits over Darktable (or even Nikon NX Studio now I’ve discovered that), but it looks interesting.

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