I think this is very true. If you edit your own pictures, you have no competition to raise the bar.
Good enough ends up mediocre.
I mean, if you don’t see what is possible, the idea doesn’t even occur to you, to try further and strive for perfection.
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We’ll put…
This is a very busy thread! Just got up this morning to be greeted with a long stack of reading material. 
Without going into too much detail, I’m under the impression that - as @qmpel said at the the start of this thread - that ART/RT has the edge, no question in terms of easy to use/resource un-intensive/clean-yet-crispy sharpening.
Yet it’s a very interesting exercise trying to work out how to reproduce it elsewhere. 
As someone mentioned, my ‘fine sharpening’ in D or S is a bit gritty, albeit fairly sharp.
I tried different demosaicing methods too, btw - the default in DT is RCD, the only one that seemed any better was AmaZe, but the difference was very minor.
I also did experiment with the old not-recommended sharpen module and contrast equalizer.
The former actually did a reasonable job with the radius set around 1 or less and tweaking the strength to taste. 
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You can run RL sharpening on export as well. I used to play with that a bit… if I recall it did a nice job actually but you use is blind so to speak…
I’m not at my computer right now to confirm, but I seem to recall that you can see output sharpening results (simulation?) in the preview. At least it changes when the tool is toggled off and on…
Again, not at my computer to test, though.
I observed similar results (RT/ART super sharp and clean, DT not so much) with raw files from Nikon Z6.
If this was back to me… i should have said the RL_output lua script in DT on export…
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I Installed ART to give it a few tests and it seems great, definitely corresponding with everything people have been saying about it. My only issue is the same as in RT, in that it’s not even half as fast as darktable on my pc (3700x, rtx 3080). Once I upgrade my CPU I’lll have to give it another go
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In all fairness, none are what I’d call fast on my laptop. Technically it has a GPU but it’s laughably wimpy. RT is a little faster in some ways but not all. darktable is no faster overall. But that’s all due to my hardware.
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I know the need to find the best raw developer well. So far, my results from RT have always been the sharpest and most vivid in detail. Capture Sharpening and a little Contrast by Detail Levesl were unrivaled. However, I also had the most experience with RT.
dt and ART didn’t stand a chance.
Now I do more with ART and also find the Capute Sharpening there and also the right setting for Local Contrast - and suddenly the results are as good as with RT, not better, but just as good. That’s quite a lot.
My point is that the question of which is the best of the three programs is basically pointless. The differences lie not in the quality of the software, but in the knowledge of the right settings.
ART is fantastic because it is intuitive to use. But we are completely dependent on Alberto. He does everything very well, is very active and extremely helpful. He explains everything to everyone with incredible patience. Long live Alberto, may he live forever!
darktable is also being actively developed, but it is very complex and not so easy to use. But that’s what many people enjoy about it.
There are three siblings, all of which are very valuable.
It would be extremely desirable for RT to be developed further again, which unfortunately is not the case.
I ask myself, what can we do to get things moving again? If RawTherapee can no longer manage on its own, perhaps others could join in and keep it alive.
That would be wonderful.
The pace of development might be slow, but it is certainly not dead at all. Not even close.
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Interesting. I’ve always had the impression DT (from what I’ve read, that is; I’ve not used it myself) was one of the easier options to get to grips with. I’ve only ever used RawTherapee, which I always thought was considered more complex (again, though, only from what I’ve read; I’ve used RawTherapee so much and for so long for so many different things that I know it inside out).
And I know I keep on saying this, but I’ll say it again: I absolutely love RawTherapee — the fact that I’ve never wanted or needed to use anything else is a testiment to how fantastic it is. I’m very lucky in that it fits my needs perfectly. 
It’s interesting to see these pixelpeeping competitions for sharpness popping up every couple of years, screenshots at 100% are nice but there is nothing valid but uncompressed output files Especially in darktable some modules behave slightly different depending on available roi, at least compare screenshots with the new “toggle high quality processing” if you pixelpeep on screen.
Some years ago - ingo weyrich was still very active - we worked to implement capture sharpening for dt. After having the detail threshold for masks and the very good sharpening presets for D&S i just stopped working on that because i personally couldn’t see any significant difference at all. Just my 2c …
EDIT: forgot to mention, haven’t used art at all (yet)
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which one’s which again?
the tonal gradations and contrasts on the right are beautiful.
My take is, when considering the sum total of how good or bad my images look, the choice between darktable, RawTherapee or ART (or Lightroom, C1, etc. for that matter) is probably about 20% of my end result at most. The other ~80% is my (lack of) ability, creativity, knowledge and skill. That’s not to minimize nor sell short any capabilities of any tool – nor the developers behind it – it’s just that I’m by far the limiting factor.
I’m sure there are measurable quantitative differences between tools but that’s normal. For whatever reason, I tried ART a little over a year ago and it just seemed to “feel good in my hands”. I’m absolutely sure others can make darktable or RawTherapee (or indeed ART) walk, talk and tap dance around me. But for now I personally get better results from ART. And that’s probably because I’ve used it a lot more lately than the others. 
Choice is Good™
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I was just curious to see how the images were handled out of the gate. So I bypassed the scene referred and tried to just compare DT with ART and this same image processed as similarly as I could… I added 1 ev to both and in ART enabled both sharpening modules at the defaults. The other two modifications were auto tone curve neutral and color denoise. So basically ART defaults plus 1 EV, both sharpening modules and color denoising. To try to match things I took the coordinates from the automatch curve which in the case of this image looks a lot like the std Adobe tone curve and I created a matching curve in the tone curve module in DT and the base curve module… And I set color preservation in them to none. So DT was legacy WB with matching values from ART, plus 1 EV, color denoise preset and diffuse module.
Art seems to be a bit more saturated and despite a similar tone treatment DT was much darker if I used the basecurve … and somewhat lighter if I used the tone curve with the same parameters. I also tried the legacy vs current module order in DT and it didn’t make too much difference…
Screenshots
ART
DT basecurve
Tone curve
JPG’s set to 90% best quality in ART auto in DT… looks like Art file is substantially smaller…
MJD04337_ART.jpg.out.arp (11.7 KB)
MJD04337.ARW.xmp (25.9 KB)
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The right image is a screenshot from ART.
Yeah, there are subtle differences int tone and color handling that make it non trivial to match the images in both editors. I also did compare various workflows in DT to narrow down to a specific module - tried the different tone mappings, the different white balancing methods, demosaic and more. It’s really insightful to try out the various methods and learn about their “inner workings”.
For me the case is somewhat closed, with the above mentioned DoS settings, those are a reasonable starting point to bring out the finest details in DT.
Actually I did try both of you mentioned options, didn’t make a significant difference - so I skipped this further down the thread.
With sharpness it’s somehow a double sided thing. I mean, we all know (and I really do think that), sharpness is for most of the images not a relevant factor. Yet, most of us buy the high mega pixels, the sharper lens … and the best sharpening algo So I do find it valid to pixelpeep, not for the single image, but to choose and optimize your base sharpening algo.
My trigger to post the thread, was the gap in perceived level of detail in DT and ART, that I just couldn’t believe. And did find @123sg 's posts very helpful, because I learned how to narrow the gap with better settings in DoS (and I think you need a high level of expertise to find those settings).
It’s actually not the sharpening, why I’m mainly interested in ART. It’s the color and tone handling that fit better with my editing process. I really need the curves for saturation and also for tones to be happy (in DT I’ve been using the color zones and tone curve for this purpose) and I think these tools are more prominent in ART.
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That is very reassuring news. Even though I’m so enthusiastic about ART at the moment, I know that RawTherapee is its foundation and we owe a lot to it. May RawTherapee also live forever.
Hello @micha
Just my 2 cents 
RawTherapee is still currently developed, on a daily basis [1]. Especially by Jacques Desmis. For instance, he is working now on the lacam branch (for colour stuff).
As regards the lack of some other “juicy stuff” (GPU support, mask through brushes like within ART, port the GUIs to GTK4 etc) my personal and questionable opinion, is that they require so much work that it is extremely unlikely they might be worked anytime soon (but I do hope to be proved wrong).
For the GTK4 port, for instance, the Inkscape team has hired a full-time developer and yet, after this big sponsorship, there are still a lot of rough edges (bugs) to solve (especially as regards the Apple pc systems).
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