Now shooting in RAW

For my first two years as a photographer I had my hands full simply learning to keep the subject in frame, in focus, and if extremely lucky in a good range of colour. With all that in mind it was an simple decision to ignore the issue of "digital development" and shoot in jpeg.

A moorhen shot in RAW with basic noise reduction in Darktable.

With a Ph. D. in Physics and experience in environmental data management, I have always been IT "literate", working primarily with the Linux operating system. This defaulted me into using the opensource darktable workflow application, which looks intimidating to a newcomer to say the least.

A grey squirrel shot in RAW with basic noise reduction in Darktable.

Fortunately, with the advent of Darktable 5 I have found an option to correct the RAW file output to a camera's jpeg output with a single profile. This allows me to shoot in RAW but have easy access to jpegs for quick social media publication. Initially my interest in RAW files is simply to learn various noise reduction techniques and software. Obviously most proprietary photography software is not written to function on Linux. Does this mean a trip to the "dark side" and a MacBook is in my future?