Darktable is one of those OSS gems that deserves more attention than it usually gets. It's usually positioned as an alternative to Adobe Lightroom. However, I think it's fair to say that there's very little left in Lightroom that Darktable doesn't offer at least three or four alternatives for. This is not like The Gimp vs Photoshop but more the other way around. IMHO, around the 2.0 release, it more than caught up in features. Since then, UI polish, a crazy amount of features, etc. have widened the gap in terms of features and utility. There are quite a few features unique to Darktable that Lightroom simply does not have and that people would normally use things like the Gimp or photoshop for. Masking alone (which works on pretty much any of the dozens of modules) just unlocks a ton of creative possibilities.

Disclaimer, I'm not a Lightroom user and have used Darktable exclusively for the last five years or so. I actually use the mac builds, which is hardly ideal given that OpenCL support on Apple is not great. Darktable definitely has lots of rough edges that make it less than ideal for some less experienced users to switch over to. While the UI has improved with this release, it is still quite complex. Many of the modules are not for the faint of heart and have steep learning curves. Simpler to use alternatives are available (there are usually multiple ways to do things in Darktable); some of which are explicitly intended for novice users. Most of the complex ones are awesome once you figure them out.

The highlight in this release for me is the improved integration between the exposure and filmic module. Both existed in previous versions and they were always intended to be used together. However, in the new version they finally replace the base curve as the default way to do tone mapping. The new default scene referred mode is basically about these two modules being turned on by default and the base curve no longer being used by default. I noticed already with 3.0 where I manually configured my defaults to do the same that this reduced the amount of work I had to do. Usually, I do some minor tweaks to the grey point with the exposure module and then finish the job in filmic. In 3.2, these seem to do a better job out of the box than in 3.0; even for (deliberately) under exposed photos. If it is too dark, you simply add a few stops in the exposure module and filmic dynamically updates the black and whitepoints. So instead of blowing out your highlights, it actually brightens the grey-point while compressing blacks and whites in a way that makes sense. Unlike the base curve, this is dynamic and unrelated to pre defined camera profiles for what would constitute a good base curve for a camera that you get with the old basecurve module. I never really got usable results with that.

I ended up deleting my settings and presets to get the new defaults in 3.2. If you upgrade from an older version and want to benefit from the new & improved defaults, you may want to do the same. I noticed when upgrading an old 2.x version on my Father's laptop that doing this may also be needed if it fails to start because of changes in its internal db (he was still on 2.4). Unfortunately it did not fail gracefully and I had to drop to the command line and rm -rf the old files. Stuff like this is exactly the kind of rough edges that make this product still a bit of a hard sell for less experienced users.