Today, I've stumbled across a post [0] on the front page talking about how RAW camera data is processed into an acceptable image. It had a quote that struck with me:

  Additionally, applying the curve to each color channel accidentally desaturated the highlights. This effect looks rather good — and is what we’ve come to expect from film — but it’s has de-yellowed the star. It’s possible to separate the luminance and curve it while preserving color. On it’s own, this would make the LED Christmas lights into an overstaturated mess, but combining both methods can produce nice results.

I think of myself as a decent hobby photographer, but I'm really bad at turning the RAW images into nice pictures. I've extensively used the "Auto" button on Lightroom and after ditching Adobe due to their price hike I've tried out RAWTherapee and Darktable/Ansel, but I mostly play with the luminance/contrast/saturation sliders until it looks nice without understanding what I do.

Reconstructing overexposed areas nicely or achieving certain visual effects is luck, same with getting the colors I'd like.

There is a ton of material out there, but I have the feeling I can't judge what is good and what is just blogspam, slop or low effort content.

I don't mind using commercial tools, but apart from learning the tool I also would like to learn and understand the underlying process.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415225