This guide is kept up-to-date with Darktable releases. It is currently written for Darktable 5.2, released June 2025. Be sure to read part 1 before you read this. There are several tools out there to develop camera RAW files into printable images, some of them are shockingly expensive. Fortunately, I have found I get the best image results using Darktable to process my RAW files. Darktable is free and open source, but it can be overwhelming at first. I've been using it to process my RAW files for 10 years now, and I thought I'd put together a short guide to how I do it. Before we dive in, make sure you have read the first tutorial on how Darktable works and how I set it up. I hate staring at a computer screen, so much of my workflow is focused on speed. As I noted in the first tutorial, there are many ways to do things in Darktable. This is not the right way to develop your RAW images, it's just my way of developing RAW images. Note that Darktable is updated twice a year and things do change. I find new tricks from time to time too so this is a continuously evolving workflow. I will keep this guide updated to reflect both changes in Darktable and changes in my own workflow. Step 1: Crop, Rotate, and Lens Correction The first thing I do is turn on the Lens Correction module. This will fix any vignetting and lens distortion. I shoot with adapted lenses occasionally though, so sometimes there's no profile to correct. Sometimes if something is real bad I'll mess with it by hand, but usually if there's no profile for my lens I just skip this step. Next up I do any cropping I want to do with the Crop module, and fix crooked horizons with the Rotate and Perspective module. When it makes sense anyway. Sometimes a tilted horizon is part of the story, so don't just do this stuff without thinking about it first. Step 2: Exposure and White Balance I tend to underexpose when shooting digital. It's easier to bring up the dark areas than recover blown highlights. Unless I am trying to blow the highlights, I underexpose my images by at least a stop. My first step then is to use the Exposure module to increase the exposure. I never touch anything else in this module, just slide the exposure up until I get the image where I want it. Move the exposure slider until you have the overall image brightness where you want it. Once exposure is dialed in how I want it, I move to the Color Correction module to work on white balance. I start by hitting the little eyedropper, which looks at the image, runs some kind of algorithm and makes a stab at adjusting the white balance. I am almost never happy with the results of the eyedropper, so I tweak the chroma slider to where I want it, usually warmer than what the algorithm picked. Occasionally I mess with the hue slider, but not very often. If there is something in the image that you know is pure white then you can hit the eyedropper and select just that portion of the image. Hit the eyedropper and see how it does, adjust the chroma slider as needed. As an aside, I never shoot with my camera set to Auto White Balance. I always shoot at about 6500-7000K for white balance. I don't want to record an abstractly correct color rendering, I want to record what I saw, and this generally matches what I see. Consequently I often just leave the white balance where the camera set it (the default in Darktable). Step 3: Color and Contrast The next place I go is the Sigmoid module. If the image doesn't need much contrast adjustment I often just leave the Sigmoid at its defaults. Lately I've been using a preset called Smooth sRGB that I got from Boris Hajdukovic. Here is a screenshot you can use to set it up for yourself if you like. Just set the sliders where I have them and then click the little three line icon on the top of the Sigmoid module and choose "Store new preset". But even when I use that preset, it's just a starting point. I'll still spend a few seconds playing around with the contrast and skew sliders until the look suits the image I'm working on. Again, I don't always use this preset. Often I do nothing with Sigmoid, the defaults work for the image. Other times I just tweak the default contrast and skew sliders to get things where I like them. I mainly increase contrast by increasing color contrast, which is the next step. By now the exposure, white balance and basic color look should be roughly as I want them. The next thing I do is bump up the color contrast and saturation using the Color Balance RGB module. I used to use a lot of presets here, but these days I don't. Mainly I just head to the bottom of the first tab, to the perceptual brilliance grading, and slightly increase the highlights slider and decrease the shadows to add some color contrast. Most images from my Sony don't need much of this, just a about +10 percent for the highlights and -10 for the shadows. Fujifilm files usually need even less, often nothing. Then I head up to the section above that one, perceptual saturation grading, and I increase the perceptual saturation for the midtones and shadows. Then at the very top I increase the overall vibrance. How much I mess with the various Color Balance tools varies tremendously according to the photo. This is where I end up spending most of my time though. I sometimes use the 4 ways tab to change tones, warm or cool greens for example, but that's only when I have some specific vision in mind. Step 4: Touch Up and Sharpen Once I have the image looking more or less the way I want it, I use the retouch module to fix any sensor spots or other blemishes (I change lenses a fair bit so dust gets on the sensor). I'll also toggle Denoise (profiled) at this point, and if there are any chromatic issues, Chromatic Aberrations. Most of the time I leave these at the default, but sometimes I back off the Preserve Shadows slider in Denoise. I do these last 3 tweaks before I sharpen the image because the sharpening is processor intensive and doing anything after that point is very slow. The last thing I do is sharpen with the Diffuse or Sharpen module. I use a couple presets, the main one you can see in the screenshot below. And that's it. I then export a JPG and either post it here on luxagraf or, more often, print it in some way shape or form (lately I've been making more books). Step 5: Other Things I Sometimes Do While that covers the 90 percent use case, sometimes I do use the Tone Equalizer module to lift shadows. Tone Equalizer can be confusing. Here's what I do. First go to the Masking tab and click the wand next to Mask Exposure Compensation. This will shift the mask so that the tones are centered and easier to work with. A good bit of the time the wand alone is enough, but if you have clipping (it'll show as orange over on the highlight side), just decrease the mask exposure compensation slider to bring it back away from that edge. Then switch to the middle tab, Advanced, and adjust the linear curve to raise the shadows. You can also move your cursor over the parts of the image you want to change and use the scroll wheel to lighten that area directly from the image (the cursor changes to a target symbol and shows you the current exposure setting). The only other modules I use are the LUT module when I want to get a specific film look, Negadoctor when I am working with film scans, and finally, if I am making a black and white image, I usually do that using the Color Calibration module, but that's complicated enough that it deserves its own post. There you have it then. I would say on average this process takes me 1-5 minutes per image, heavily weighted toward the 1 minute side of the scale. It's still a bit of work, and there are plenty of times that I use JPGs straight out of the camera (especially from my Fujifilm x70), but when an image needs a little work, this is how I do it. I hope maybe this can help other people get going with Darktable. If you have questions drop a comment below.

I think we've always know that if we got ourselves another patch of dirt with some sticks on it, it'd be in one of a handful of very small places. The short list was, in the order we visited them: Apalachicola FL, Mancos CO, Washburn WI, and the Outer Banks NC (especially Okracoke Island). These places all share one thing: they're at the fringes of the world, a bit off the map and outside the collective consciousness of the country. Life in all of these places is distinctly different than anywhere else, and it takes a certain kind of person to live in them. When you do the land stamps itself on you. These places all have routine hardship. Mancos and Washburn have long, hard winters1, Apalachicola and the Outer Banks have the ever-present threat of hurricanes. Hardships like these make life more interesting. They make you feel alive. In the end, we landed in Washburn. This is where the kids made friends and that was the deciding factor. If I were picking for myself, I might have chosen Apalachicola. Maybe Mancos. Well, truth be told, I would keep traveling, but Corrinne and the kids wanted to stay in one place for a while, have something more stable. I think we were all finally tired of living in the bus. Last spring, after crawling out from under the bus, soaked in gasoline, having changed the fuel pump for the 4th time in 8 years, I found myself thinking, is this really an adventure or has it become more of a routine pain in the ass? You could say that's a small price to pay for being able to live on the road, and in some ways that's true, but in others it isn't. No matter how good I get at fixing the bus -- and I'm not very good at it -- I'm never going to stop needing to fix it. And I was tired of fixing it. When you're fixing the same things over and over again, that's not fun, that's the kind of routine that travel is supposed to free you from. That was only my experience though. For everyone else the problem was that the big blue bus had become the small blue bus. Living in such cramp quarters just wasn't fun anymore. It was no hardship to live in a small space with five people when three of them were under the age of 6. Now that there are two teenagers and a 10-year-old boy it just wasn't big enough for us. We'd already decided to build out a school bus so we'd have more room. It has beds that we don't have to make and unmake everyday. There's a kitchen big enough for two to cook in, an oven that works, and 10 extra feet of storage. It's enough room for us. While getting Lyme slowed me down, the plan was still to move into it this summer, right up until the end of April when we found the house we ended up buying. From a few months ago, starting on the kitchen and bathroom. We still have the school bus, we can continue to travel, but when we're in the Washburn area, we'll have a house rather than having to stay in Memorial Park or rent a cabin. As the one member of the family who has never liked camping in Memorial Park, I might be the happiest about that part. It just doesn't make sense to live in an RV if you aren't traveling in it. They're small and cramped, you always have to fill and empty the tanks. The payoff is when you end up somewhere new all the time. If you aren't doing that, and we haven't been, at least not in the summer for the past three years, then it makes more sense to live in a house in the place you want to be. One day this spring Corrinne was out walking and saw a house for sale that fit just about everything we wanted. It had a little land (5 acres, with some ponds), but was still only a 10 minute bike ride from the center of town, so the kids can have their independence. It's the sort of house that really only we would like. It's oddly laid out, curiously half-finished, painted with murals and other oddities -- the last thing in the world retirees from the city would ever want (the main buyers up here). For us it's like a blank slate we can build to suit our needs. It needs some work for sure, but we're used to that. We found it, knew it was right for us, and made an offer the next day. It was accepted, and we moved in 45 days later. We still plan to travel. Me especially, since travel is central to everything I enjoy doing: exploring the world and sharing my experiences in words and photos. The main difference is that now we'll have a home base, a place where my wife and kids can feel a bit more stable. At least they used to. I suspect that is mostly a thing of the past, but we shall see. ↩

If you subtract out 2020, when everything shut down and we rented a farm house in South Carolina, April 2025 marks seven years on the road in our 1969 Dodge Travco. We left our previous home of Athens GA on April 1, 2017. Our twin daughters were 4 years old. Our son was not yet 2. We spent 18 months traveling, breaking down, repairing the bus, traveling some more. Breaking down a little less and traveling some more. From Florida, across the gulf, through Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Colorado again, Utah, Nevada, California, and then back east through Arizona, Texas again, the gulf coast, the midwest, the Great Lakes. Over the next six years we'd go through 27 states and a smidgen of Canada. We took a short break in 2019 to spend some time in Mexico. But we've never had a home aside from the bus, as we call it. The kids grew up on the road. I stopped writing much about them in the last few years because they are their own people, and can speak for themselves, but I know that living in the bus was an experience I don't think any of them would change for anything. They are who they are in many respects because of how we lived. They've had experiences most of their peers never will, particularly when it comes to education. They've been able to learn from doing rather than just reading. They've seen and touched things that exist only in books for most kids. They know the names of plants and animals because they've seen them in the wild. They know what a ghost town is like because they've slept in one. They know what the Milky Way looks like because they've seen it. They've eaten lunch in the woods where Pocahontas played. They know how a loom works because someone showed them. They know what it's like to be hot and frustrated and bored when the bus overheats and there is nothing to do but wait for dad to fix it. Experience shapes you. Especially the difficult experiences, which teach you resilience and also how to appreciate the good times. When things are hard every little thing becomes a treasure -- a sandwich, a smile, a ride to the parts store. Even grabbing the right wrench on the first try feels like an accomplishment of the gods sometimes. I don't know what they'll do with all these experiences, but I know that experience stays with you forever. I know that life on the road has given me kind, considerate, thoughtful children, which is all I ever wanted them to be. I too would not change a thing. People often ask why we live this way. I could answer that question many ways, probably a different way each day, but a big one would be because traveling reminds you that you're alive. It snaps you out of routines and reminds you that you're more than the collection of habits you've acquired over years, that your days are for more than getting through them, that in fact there aren't that many of them to be had, that each of them is a gift, and that all that really matters is that you are present for all of them, really, really here.

March saw the kids and I head to California to visit my parents again. This time we flew out of Duluth, which is a delightfully tiny, empty airport that knows nothing of lines or hassles. When the four of us went through security we were the only people in the line, and we outnumbered the staff by two. It reminded me of flying in the previous century, back when it was fun. The only real downside was connecting through Minneapolis, which meant we had to wait a few hours for our flight to California. From the air you can really appreciate how flat Wisconsin is, almost like a giant sheet of ice came along and smashed it. California has changed a lot over the last few decades. I really don't recognize it anymore. I was thinking about this on the last trip too. When I was a kid growing up in southern California there was still room for weirdness. I think housing prices have driven out the last of the odd people now, but back then you could do weird things, like build a ship in your backyard. This story is something of a local legend. In the 1970s, in a regular suburban yard in Costa Mesa California, a man, driven by some obsession, decided to build a ship. Not just any ship, but a 118-foot replica of a Revolutionary War-era privateer. In his backyard. It took Dennis Holland 13 years to build the ship. He had to bulldoze his house to get it out and down to the harbor. That is dedication. It was mostly before my time, but I remember it vaguely. It launched when I was 9 in 1983. Later, in high school, when I was rowing with the crew team, we'd see it going in and out of the harbor for charters. Unsurprisingly, even as a kid I was drawn to people like Holland. I never met him, but I have always admired people with the obsessive drive to do the weird things they want to do. Most people in the world would laugh at Holland's plan. Probably many did. He just went and did it. If you want to do something bad enough, you usually can. Holland died over a decade ago, but the ship is still around. When you put something like that into the world, often the world takes care of it for you. Holland eventually sold the Pilgrim of Newport, as he called it, to the Ocean Institute in Dana Point (who renamed it, Spirit of Dana Point). You can still do a half day sail, just like you could when Holland was chartering it in Newport. My kids have been begging to get on a tall ship pretty much since they found out they existed, so we signed ourselves up for a sail on the Spirit of Dana Point. I wasn't expecting much from the sail. Usually on these sorts of things you're luggage, they hand you a plastic cup of juice and stow you in the back. This wasn't like that. This was hands on sailing. The crew of Spirit of Dana Point had passengers raising the sails and steering the ship. We may not have gone far, but four hours flew by and the kids had the time of their lives. Thanks Dennis Holland for having the crazy idea that you could built a Revolutionary War vessel in a suburban backyard and then for actually doing it. Never listen to the people who say you're crazy to build a ship (or live in a 50 year old motorhome). Just get after it. The Spirit of Dana Point was a tough act to follow, but we had fun just hanging around Newport. I took the kids down to The Wedge, where I used body surf. We also went back to the Balboa Fun Zone because Elliott has been talking about it pretty much since we left it last time. Then, after a week of citrus and summertime (and tacos), it was time to head back to the haggis and cider of the long winter.