And I think that that is the key. Practice, practice, practice.
@mikemyers - don’t rely on tutorials unless they deal specifically with the type of images you are making and the problems you are encountering.
I find PhotoJoseph’s videos horrendously confusing as he flits from one thing to another, then changes his mind, then gets another idea, reverts back to something else, etc.
I do tutorial sessions at my local photo club and it can take a good couple of hours of well prepared, personal, hands on, tuition on the students’ own images that they want to change, before the penny drops.
But, as Mark and others have said often, a lot of your images tend to be JPEG-style, journalistic, with no particular need for enhancement - mainly because you don’t seem to want to enhance them, apart from making small corrections. Most of the time, you really don’t benefit from the power of such sophisticated software and, since you don’t really have an end result in sight, you seem to end up “footling” around without really knowing where you are going and which tool does what.
And now, still being in a muddle over how to use PhotoLab and not knowing how to master your camera, you have decided to try and teach others how to use one of the most complicated editing tools out there - DarkTable. We have one person in our club of about 120 members who knows what they are doing with it. But that has taken him years of learning and still, when he gives a demonstration, it doesn’t take long for his audience to get totally lost.
It is almost embarrassing when it comes my turn to demonstrate PhotoLab. Whilst they have to do all sorts of gymnastics to achieve a desired result, it usually takes me about five minutes and only a few clicks.
But, if that is where you are going, you should really concentrate on one thing at a time and perhaps put PL to one side for a while. I certainly wouldn’t ever contemplate changing horses mid-stream like that as I have too much invested in PL and it is an essential part of my day to day work.