The picture straight out of the camera is the following:Ī Beetle is a fun car and I did not want to make a sad picture from this photography. There is an old cover on the car which gave a strange pirat look to the car. It features an old Volkswagen Beetle in a parking near a house. The picture was made during autumn 2011 in San Francisco.

Darktable is for now available on Linux and Mac OS X but Gimp is available for most platforms. This two tools are free available free software. Do as much photo improvement as you can in Darktable (framing, denoising, sharpening, color correction, lens correction, color aberration correction.) then finally edit the output in Gimp where you can remove unwanted details and do all final fine-tuning before exporting the image with the format and quality you'll need.I’ve worked on a picture of a Volkswagen Beetle using Darktable and Gimp for post processing.

If you are still a beginner, I'll not advise you to always shoot in raw, because processing every single raw photo can be boring at the beginning (and even after.) You can shoot in raw + jpeg and have a try with only a few raw files. Also raw images with wrong exposure can be corrected easier if taken in raw, because it keeps most information the sensor has captured.

When you shoot in JPEG, the photo is automatically processed from the raw image on the sensor into JPEG within the camera, you don't control this process, that can even create unwanted artifacts, fake sharpness, excessive softening, and so on.

But JPEG is an 8-bit format that does not record as much information as raw. Most people take their photos in JPEG, so that they don't need a raw decoder and don't understand what use it is. As a standalone, it is the equivalent of Lightroom: converting raw format then do basic editing on it, then save the result to JPEG, PNG or other popular formats, and also do basic editing on JPEG images from your camera. As schumaml told it, Darktable is a raw file decoder, and, if you use it as a plug-in, it will do the same as Camera Raw for Photoshop: converting raw files into a format like TIFF that can be edited in Gimp.

Using darktable with gimp