The saturation and colours are clearly ‘way more’ then what Darktable wants to do by default. So don’t be afraid to crank some sliders :).
With Lightroom, always remember that the highlight slider does more things at once, and in DT you have to use a few modules to do the same. And I have a feeling you were working with the clarity slider in Lightroom, which means it needs some extra local-contrast somewhere.
There are never true 1:1 equivalents, but knowing things like this makes it more straight forward. I think at least :).
As almost always, I work with the exposure slider (without filmic or sigmoid enabled even, personal choice) to set the exposure of the subject. In this case, I focus that the grass has the light I want it to be (so the shadows are somewhere where I want them to be) and trying to ignore the highlights.
Latest filmic defaults (so v6 with power and such) I often start with just setting white point auto, I leave black alone. Then add color-rgb, start with vibrant preset. Then start turning the highlight slider up, because we want all the colours there. Add local-contrast in bilateral, contrast to 3 (or even 4 here) and start cranking the detail slider, but not too much. I add a mask to ignore the extreme highlights, those can be messy, and I don’t want the messy parts to be boosted.
Now I go back to filmic and start moving the white slider up and down to see what the effect does and where I end up with it.
In the end, I remembered that sigmoid was ‘the sunset tonemapper’ , so I checked that out quickly… got something I like a bit more (less salmon) and settled on that. But it’s close.
Now, comparing back to your image, the grass / shadows are still a bit too dark, so I enable the tone-equalizer, set it to one eigf shadow/highlight compression, but after that reset the curve. Then move my mouse over the grass and use the scroll-wheel up a bit to boost the shadows.
I don’t do studio work often - or indoor shots. But most natural outside shots, I do something like this. Exposure first, brighter than you might think, ignore highlights. Set up a quick filmic with auto white point, doesn’t have to be perfect. Add colours, add local contrast (often only in the highlights, in this shot the opposite ), then go back to filmic to tweak the white point slider.
Sometimes if the amount of highlight data that needs to be compressed is a lot - like really a lot - I turn to the tone equalizer to turn the highlights down first. Or - like here - after the basics are done, I see I want a part a bit brighter, and I grab the tone equalizer.
(And I cheat by using DxO as a preprocessor for lens-correction and denoising).
DSC_9310_fix.dng.xmp (10.5 KB)
DSC_9310_fix.dng (74.6 MB)