Today, 08:47 AM
Not a good way to do things IMHO.
When you use DarkTable or RawTherapee as Gimp plugins, File > Open takes you to a full-grown RT/DT UI and while you are in there, you aren't really in Gimp, so your whole workflow is in a dangling state where you have to exit DT/RT to exit Gimp. When you get a little bit familiar with DT/RT you find that most of the tools are at least as powerful as Gimp's when not somewhat better or more suitable for photos(*).
So you end up spending most of the processing time in DT/RT and can very often skip Gimp. And if you want Gimp, then at least DT can export directly in GIMP high precision format (and both can do I precision TIFF) so there is no loss there.
So, better keep them as separate applications.
(*) My favorite example is DT's perspective/rotation tool that knows that the things to correct come from the camera's pitch/roll. And it will apply lensfun corrections at the right place in the workflow.
When you use DarkTable or RawTherapee as Gimp plugins, File > Open takes you to a full-grown RT/DT UI and while you are in there, you aren't really in Gimp, so your whole workflow is in a dangling state where you have to exit DT/RT to exit Gimp. When you get a little bit familiar with DT/RT you find that most of the tools are at least as powerful as Gimp's when not somewhat better or more suitable for photos(*).
So you end up spending most of the processing time in DT/RT and can very often skip Gimp. And if you want Gimp, then at least DT can export directly in GIMP high precision format (and both can do I precision TIFF) so there is no loss there.
So, better keep them as separate applications.
(*) My favorite example is DT's perspective/rotation tool that knows that the things to correct come from the camera's pitch/roll. And it will apply lensfun corrections at the right place in the workflow.