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Personally, I found Darktable to be the by far best raw editor I’ve ever used, and I used quite a few.

I used to think, that digital editing was hard and that I was quite bad at it until I tried Darktable. Darktable is easier and it gives you more consistent and predictable results than any other raw editor. Reason is that other raw editors basically just try to make it look good on the screen and then apply any transformations on top of the “good-looking” copy (Display-Referred workflow), which leads to unpredictable results. I can speak from experience when I say Darktable saves me countless hours in my job. Software really makes a massive difference in your photos and workflow and Darktable’s FOSS. So no harm in trying. Yes, I’m shilling Darktable hard because it is so good. Believe me, if you ever had to do any sort of advanced editing in Lightroom or Capture One, you know what I’m talking about when you try twisting the programme’s arm into giving you something acceptable and then trying making it look consistent with other pictures.

Best example is highlight recovery. Most programs don’t do real highlight recovery. They just give you back what the camera has already recorded, but have deliberately thrown away to give you a good looking copy right when you load the image the first time. Thanks to applying a curve first, and then everything else on top of said base curve. So if you continue to multiply on top of other transformations, you’ll essentially multiply more and more errors, and it will really show.

For starting out, stick to the predefined workflow and modules and work away. There’s your active modules and then you can add more modules to your active ones. There is a basic workflow when you load every image that gives you a good-looking result, but thanks to everything being exposed to you, the user, you have full control of all of it. Each module completes processing and hands off the result to the next module from bottom to top. So you always know what is going on in your raw workflow and in what order, which is very important. Funnily enough, other raw editors mostly don’t tell you what’s happening in what order, so you kind of have to make a guess, and just try and see what you get. It doesn’t have to be this way, it can be better. If you want to go really deeply into raw editing, read the excellent manual. But if you just want to keep it surface level, that’s alright as well. Just stick to the predefined modules and their order and you’ll be golden.

TLDR: Darktable good.

Buttery smooth. I reckon yours is the 1000/11?

That’s not a deliberate effect. This is just how the Reflex Nikkor 500/8 renders bokeh. The mirror inside the lens is essentially doughnut shaped and reflects the image back into itself. So technically speaking, there is a massive gaping hole in the middle of the lens. This is why you see the ring effect in the out-of-focus blur.

Edit: Corrected a Typo.

Try Gregory Crewdson. I’m unsure about the genre though.

Fujifilm XH1, bargain bin price and professional quality. And if I had to glue one lens onto it, it would be the 16-80mm OIS. This zoom lens is astonishingly good, it renders just like a bad prime lens, and this is high praise.

I read a Wikibooks article about photography equipment some time ago, so in case you find it helpful:

https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Photography_Equipment/What_should_I_get%3F

Edit: I forgot to mention that this lens can also be used as a pseudo-macro lens.

Well, again, for home use it will be sufficient. A4 size is the maximum in my opinion. If you want to go bigger than that, you need a proper camera. Phones aren’t made for professional applications, they’re made for just quickly taking pictures of things that you may find interesting or just take selfies with your family and for that they’re perfect. There are in your pocket when you need them and you don’t need to fiddle around with settings.

If you want to do something more advanced like colour grading in Darktable, you need to do a bit more to make usable raw files for that application. Downlaod OpenCamera, set it to RAW and standard, Set exposure-bracketing-pictures to 5 and exposure-bracketing-stops to 3. Make sure Camera2 API is selected in the main options menu for this to show up. Then in Darktable you can merge the five photos you have to one big one and you’ll have a surprisingly capable raw file. Just to be clear, you don’t need to do this if you just want to take quick pictures that look fine. This is just for something more advanced, if you’d like to color grade and post-process your photos in general.

Edit: fixed typo.

If you’re taking selfies exclusively and only want to share them to other people’s phones, definitely not. You won’t be able to enjoy the quality of your new camera on a screen this small and you’ll also need the extreme wide angle that phones usually have. Buy a new phone, it is more than sufficient for that application. Also, if you’re living in the EU, starting February 18th, 2027, batteries will be replaceable again, so you should wait for that, if you can.

If you want to enter the hobby or the profession of photography, the answer would be different. But if it is, again, just for phones, phone cameras are perfectly sufficient for that.

This has nothing to do with the Apple ecosystem. This is just a fact of manufacturing because different screens will have different qualities. You will never have full control over this aspect because you cannot control what screens your audience will use.

But that being said, you can minimise the effect, and that is with a proper colour-managed workflow. To have a proper colour-managed workflow, there are few things to understand. Your camera, lens and the lighting conditions will all have a massive effect on your colour reproduction. This is why post-production usually is done in two parts, primary colour grading and secondary colour grading. Primary color grading refers to the process of making the output of a camera look technologically correct, while secondary color grading is usually done for creative effect. There is a right way to do primary color grading, but there is no right way to do secondary color grading. Now this in more practical terms means that in primary color grading you first of all focus on making the camera look like real life and in the second step you take that “real life” corrected image and turn it into something aesthetically pleasing.

Now to achieve this in more practical terms, you need to do a few different things. Firstly, you need a corrected monitor. That, you achieve by buying a so-called colourimeter, which is just an image sensor behind a lens, which the manufacturer has actually calibrated. When a manufacturer says it has factory calibrated a monitor, it means it has been generally colour corrected, not your monitor specifically, because there are also variances between copies of the same monitor model. So, now you need to download the software called DisplayCal, which will then show different colours on the monitor. The colorimator will take an image of the colour that your monitor has shown and calculate the difference between these two. Depending on the number of steps, it does this a few thousand times and calculates a big table with correction values, such that in the software, wrong values will be sent to the monitor And with the natural offset your monitor has, it will now show up correctly to your eye. This step takes care of your monitor.

Now, as for your camera, that is a little bit more complex. For the full details, I think you should read the darktable manual. Even if you don’t use the programme, it will give you a good basic understanding of what’s going on with your digital image. So, firstly, you need to understand that no digital camera actually sees colour. It just sees various intensities of the red, green and blue channels. And from there, a mathematical model is used to basically blur the image together in an elaborate way, which creates colour. Now, basically before starting out you’ve already lost there, furthermore your lens and the lighting conditions will have a massive influence on how colour is rendered in the final image. Therefore you need something which has known colour beforehand. This is done by using a colour chart, basically a sheet of plastic or paper which has been created with a high-end digital printing process where the colours are perfectly exact. You should use Darktable, which has the by far easiest colour workflow that I’ve ever worked with, to correct the colours with the so-called colour calibration module. It really is that simple: Just align the patches in the software with the patches of the actual color chart and there you go. Press a button and there’s your finished colour profile. Now, there are obviously more elaborate things going on under the bonnet, but for you, the end user, it is being kept dead simple. And that’s what makes it truly elegant.

To guarantee maximum compatibility for your finished images, you should always export as sRGB, because that profile has been around for so many years, and every device, no matter how bad the monitor is, supports it.

And with that, you basically have done everything you can to guarantee colour consistency between devices for your audience. To recapitulate, firstly, you should use DisplayCal with the colourimator to profile your monitor. Therefore, you know it is colour neutral. Secondly, if you’re shooting under a certain light source just take a picture of your color chart under this light source or just in the room you’re currently shooting and later use darktable to edit your images because it has the simplest colour management workflow that I have ever seen. Lastly, export your images in the most compatible colour format, which is sRGB. Because every device supports it, it has been around for so many years, no matter how bad the device is, it can display sRGB. This will guarantee the most colour consistency. Do not worry about HDR or any or other of these bits and bobs. Just do sRGB and JPEGs and you’ll be golden.

Edit: Fixed spelling mistakes and clarified some others.