Now that is the a description! Thank you! 
btw: As you can see in the Screenshots (Post 73) I did not touch Texture/Clarity/Dehaze at all on the overall photo, especially the grass. Just for the sky mask I used a little bit of Dehaze. So it’s even more obvious LR does a lot of things internally when simply moving sliders
These threads are also important for people who don’t know much about darktable or RT and often look at it or write articles about it. We’ve seen a few DPReview articles where they barely scratched the surface or put in the effort, sometimes only comparing the default output. If they stumbled upon one of these threads maybe they could link it, or realize what can be achieved and put a little more effort into their article about said software. darktable is almost always talked about as an unwieldy monster with hundreds of modules where you need a degree to get a decent result and hopefully this proves them wrong, or at least makes them question it.
I think dpreview largely takes the release announcement and does a random YouTube search. I don’t think they’ll ever do in-depth research, as darktable, unlike commercial products featured on their site, does not produce income. I have the feeling they only provide coverage to show they are balanced and independent. They don’t even care to reach out to the community for advice (for example, ‘Which video would you recommend to explain and demonstrate new features?’).
Ah, but you pushed the shadow-slider way up. Which proves my point exactly (because that’s also doing the same thing as pulling the highlights down, adding local contrast to get details more visible next to a change in a curve somewhere).
I missed your LR post to be honest. Also, it’s been a while since I looked at LR. I don’t recognize the ‘texture’ slider in there for example.
Knowing you actually were pushing the blues a certain direction, would’ve helped, because I did very little with masking or selection colors. Just ‘global tone-mapping’ and ‘boosting local contrast’.
Adding ‘color balance rgb’, adding a parametic mask and selecting the blues (‘hz’ is the hue).
In the 4-way tab you can get some quick results by then lowering the global luminance, to darken blues, and in the original master tab you have hue-shift to push the blues more towards another kind of blue, and global vibrance to quickly ‘make them pop more’
Remember that you can often right-click on a slider to enter values manually, and also extend the range. The global luminance slider in the 4-ways tab goes to -5% for example, but if you right-click and type in ‘-10’, it’s now a slider that goes to -10%, and you can tune with the mouse.
If you like the darkblue broody skies:
I don’t have LR but I do have ON1 and for sure just cycling through their profile options can make a massive difference. There I select linear raw and this is more like the basic starting point for DT. They also have a neutral be even that has a substantial boost over the linear raw profile starting point. So massive changes to tone and color right out of the gate and LR will be doing the same sort of thing so doing a DT edit will always have to add module to compensate for that when you do a comparative edit and this might not actually be the way you would approach just doing a DT edit on its own from scratch…
Using the tone eq and blending in the blue channel can be yet another tool you can use on the sky. Use a gradient/drawn masking option if further control is needed and with some opacity adjustment you can dial in some nice blue and also impact yellows… + values on the curve add blue and negative ones can essentially add/boost yellow so you can use it to tonally tweak skies. I often even try without the mask as it can transfer the effect to scattered light or bounce light cast and make the effect seem more normal say for example a reflection on the lake.
I finally have something to chime in with, and it was not easy by any means. dt 4.2.1
DSC_9310.NEF.xmp (8.7 KB)
DSC_9310.NEF.arp (41.7 KB)
Outstanding edit! What fantastic color judgment. That is something to learn from and to strive for!
Long time lurker, but i wanted to try this one as I’ve been trying to get close to the colors Adobe brings. This is the result of some module presets I made over the years (most of which I have set up to be the default), and a bit of manual tweaking, but all in all it maybe took me 2 minutes to get to this:
Not just a few sliders, but a 5 min edit at least. Two instances of tone eq, a general and one for additional contrast in the sky, two instances of color balance rgb, a general and one for extra saturation in the yellow sunlight, an extra instance of exposure for lifting the shadows in the bottom of the image, and finally double up on local contrast: 1 x diff&sharpen, 1 local contrast.
OP here. I’m playing with darktable a lot recently and I learned so much by watching the YT videos from @s7habo and practicing what I learned. And guess what: Tables have somewhat turned, I caught myself trying to replicate a dt edit in LR . And I’m not that proud of my original edit anymore. Anyways I still appreciate every single one of your edits whether they try to mimic mine or add another flavor. Thank you!
Good to hear you’ve continued to evolve your skills, regardless of which software
You may fall back to the dark side of the force again, darktable is the resistance… 
