Yes thats right. And I didn’t try to match these two perfectly, but I used in both edits a manual tone curve, a reasonable matching white balance and saturation.
But, I mean, just look at the fine details that ART manages two bring out. DT almost appears pixelated or blocky in comparison. It might just be a bit exaggerated by sloppy use of local contrast in DT.
Its hard to say from screenshot on my end but for example I noted in your close-up of with the eyes…the pupil in the DT export had that sort of black that was not crisp whereas the ART one seemed nice a “black” This is what I found I needed to do in DT was either do a small tweak to the black or moving to relative renders using the color.org profile… Then for me it was night and day and I was much happier with my DT edits … This might all be subjective on my part … There is also the thing in DT where setting the high quality reprocessing does seem to make a difference in your exported jpg in DT… Setting it to no seems to produce an export that more closely maintains the look of the full screen preview where as setting it to yes will export an image that is more faithful to what you see when zoomed in 1:1… so just another possible nuance when trying to compare…
If I look at the screenshot in full size, I find it clearly visible. But yeah, this stuff is pretty subject, I guess. Maybe someone else can judge?!
I sure appreciate your opinion.
Yes, I know this option. But above is just a screenshot from the editor, though.
For sure… I am away from my PC with a decent monitor so I will take a look and play around a bit at home
I downloaded the image, and opened it on a 4K monitor in Geeqie at 1:1 (so without scaling, as the image is ‘only’ 2440 pixels wide). Then I asked one of my children, to whisper to me which one she found sharper. Finally, I asked my wife. All 3 of us thought the the image on the right, so darktable, looked sharper. That could of course be due to contrast, not sharpness.
I would not trust any kind of preview / thumbnail in an editor, BTW. I think exporting at full size and comparing the exported images is the right way to go, if you really want to pixel-peep.
Aren’t the right images those from ART?
If you are responding to me: I was referring to ART blows me away... - #7, where ART is on the left, darktable on the right.
Yes, that’s quite impressive. Obviously I don’t know what setting you used in DT but I don’t like the sharpen demosaicing AA filter preset. I always start with the no AA preset and tweak from there.
Of course, I’m not trying to convince you to go back to dt from ART 
But I am impressed like you from that comparison. I’ll have to do some experimentation…
I have worked more with RT than ART but they have a lot of the same tools so I think my observations still apply. I was always amazed at how sharp my RT exports were compared to the blurred image in editor. Not sure if that’s a quality setting that can be changed or the downsizing algorithm used, but you certainly can’t compare an images true sharpness at anything other than 100%. I did however find it trickier to properly edit RT’s blurry images.
Capture sharpening was one of the main reasons I preferred RT over DT for a while, but DoS (along with details mask) negates that advantage. I find it more versatile and capable of superior results, and have created my own presets for quick use, however capture sharpening is far simpler and can yield better results out of the box.
For what it’s worth, I don’t see that much difference, with a little tweaking in diffuse or sharpen.
Mind you, maybe this isn’t the best kind of image…
Indeed I was refering to the first post, not #7.
Though I hae to say that even viewing the original image at 1:1, to me the left one (so the one from ART) is sharper, or with finer detail than the one on the right.
15 sliders to control DoS 
Definitely, as I said above, I agree.
Cool isn’t it? 
But yeah, it did take a while for me to get the hang of it. I only touched two sliders in my example though, after starting with the demosaicing no AA preset.
Here I was responding to @kofa 
I don’t use/know Darktable, so I had to look up on the web what DoS is. Form what I understand, some other modules in ART could maybe do some parts of what DoS: Dehaze, and Texture boost/Sharpening.
Gulp. Sorry!
Yes, DoS is a bit of do-it-all sharpness/blur/local contrast/texture/bloom module.
I think the designer considered that it replaced all the previous modules for those purposes in one sweep… but it doesn’t seem quite that simple in practice.
I do have slight reservations about it’s design/UI… but I don’t have any real understanding of the actual mechanics of it, so wouldn’t want to make comment on that.
It’s designed to run effectively on presets for non-expert use and does pretty well like that - I’ve got sufficient understanding of it to effectively tweak some aspects now, but you’re absolutely right that it’s not really user friendly.
Yes. But again, that’s a deficiency in my abilities, strictly speaking. It’s a difference of philosophies, really.
I don’t tend to sharpen too much, at least I tell myself to not sharpen too much. I probably do anyway but I find for my purposes, in ART I’ll tweak the RLC threshold mask down to only what I need to sharpen and then the defaults give a pretty pleasing bit of ‘life’ to it. Not too much, not too little.
Beyond that, I sometimes add a little High Pass sharpen through a mask in Affinity Photo (same can be done in GIMP). I sometimes I wish I could sharpen through a localized mask in ART, but that’s a major architectural difference. I’ve tried ART’s (local / masked) Texture Boost/Sharpening tool but not a lot yet. I need to play with it more and learn how to properly use it, since I usually end up overdoing things.
Hear, hear! I just can’t thank everyone involved with FOSS — especially the developers — enough.
I’m glad you discovered the joy of using ART; I’ve never used ART or Darktable, but that’s ONLY because I use RawTherapee and it does everything I need it to do — plus a huge amount more — so darn well!
So I’m just curious… random image shared here…
I was playing around because I had it from that thread so I just started to play in ART and DT… So the man has a mustache, stubble on the face and curly hair, there is lettering on the shirt. Fine hair on the forearm and a number on the handle of the axe and there are the details in the wood block where the wood has been chopped away… maybe even the hands holding the axe… These are some areas with details… or the potential to target the details if you wanted to… How would you edit that or in some other image if you want to demonstrate the optimal or “blows me away” result… I’m just curious to get a baseline to try to experiment with myself… I did a couple of quick edits and by adding default capture sharpening and output sharpening, both added using their defaults it did not appear to be so clearly different from DT with just the no AA filter on D&S…
This could be the image and the fact that I did not tweak the ART settings at all that’s why I am curious what you apply to see that sort of impact on your edits… again to learn not to say A is better than B…
Admittedly, I don’t use ART, but alternate between RT and DT, and when it comes to sharpness, I can never get good results with DT. RT in terms of sharpening is unrivaled. The sharpness of grass, hair and small structures is stunning in RT, so I definitely use RT more often.
