It did have a severe lack of contrast. Decided color was the way to go. Considering that I still barely understand what I’m doing with the channel mixer, I think I managed pretty well. Also found the blue sky distracting, so bleached it.
It won’t work in Lightroom either. Only in darktable 
I’m pretty sure all of the xmp files in this thread are from darktable, not LR. darktable is as open-source as RT, and is heavily supported on the forum here (and Lightroom will not load darktable xmp files). Welcome to pixls. 
Yes, of course, you are correct @BorisRabit , XMP (an Adobe extension) is also supported by DarkTable. I wonder if also supported in ART. Maybe I need to try DarkTable? I don’t like these “second thoughts”, although I’m on this for merely five days lol. I thought RT was the best choice for me, but what if I want to edit XMP’s, etc…?
Thanks for the play.
Unfortunately, the site is not allowing me to upload images at the moment, so I cannot share my results.
Just FYI, darktable is not compatible with Adobe XMPs and vice versa - the two applications have completely different pipelines, tools and so on. XMP is just a “database” style format, it’s up to software what goes in it.
Just wanted to clarify that - probably unnecessarily.
As to choosing which application - why not try both? 
There’s ART too, similar to RT but with some similarities to darktable in some of it’s tools as well.
And I don’t think I had an opportunity to say, welcome to the forum!
Thank you very much @123sg 
Great being here!
I tried to install ART (RT fork), but having difficulties with “mimalloc” dependency, need to clone it from github, and I’m not an expert.
Installed DT now, had to install “snap” for that, which I also didn’t like (to mess with the system… potentially unsecured repositories, etc) but I did it anyway, and configured the “desktop” file so it’s running ok.
First impression from DT : It feels “anemic”, and I have some “block” from farther trying it. Maybe later.
On another too old and slow computer I have Adobe Creative Suite, so I want maybe to explore also the options mentioned here:
EDIT: I DON’T LIKE DARKTABLE: I find it hard to navigate (at least on laptop, maybe for larger screens it’s better), mouse scroll in menus was a bad experience, feels “clunky” for me, and also heavy on my system. I want to try ART, and I guess I’ll just have to ditch editing XMP and other files that won’t open in RT/ART.
Just to make it clear, the darktable XMP files, can only be used in darktable itself. No need to waste time, trying to convert these.
The problem is not the XMP format.
Metadata like captions, keywords and EXIF data can transfer between programs perfectly through XMP (I depend on that in my basic workflow…). But that only works when both programs use the same tags (for EXIF, that’s not a problem, for keywords, captions and such there are several commonly used namespaces, so that often works as well out of the box).
What does not translate are processing instructions (or any other “private” tags).
While the xml tags can be read perfectly by the receiving program, that program wouldn’t know what to do with instructions for another program:
So the only safe way is to ignore tags that are not understood, and that includes all processing tags (and is what the xml standard demands…).
Starting from .pp3 files, same reasoning: you may be able to translate such a file to xml (should not too difficult, at that), but darktable would be unable to use the data, as it doesn’t “know” what the data mean… So the translation would be useless for the purpose.
Success this time. I managed to get some details in the sky using a graduated density filter; I also found the textures of the grass, the stone blockwork, and the cliff-face appealing, which directed me to the monochrome treatment.
I tried again with RT, and this is the best I could do:
And then… I met ART (most current version - ced150176)
THANK YOU!
This time, I’m okay with it.
Thank you for the practice!
Here also a 2nd try on this, after almost 2 hours of fiddling around. RT 5.9 again
Very good progress!
nice view, here my version with RT 5.9dev:
Martin
