You don’t have the fine detail editing ability of GIMP, but you will find it much faster to edit pictures, especially when you have more than half a dozen to do!
That’s right, the main reason being that GIMP and RAWTherapee/Lightroom are designed for different jobs. GIMP is made specifically for pixel-level editing, you can control every little detail.
Lightroom/RAWTherapee, on the other hand, are geared more toward global adjustments, especially for photographs. Each program is excellent at what it does, and a combination of both is the ideal situation.
@tuvok9597, You’re right, the first definitely has more “pop” to it, but I don’t really know why! (#1 was edited with RAWTherapee, by the way…) I went back to Lightroom to try to make the 2 edits look more similar, but even pushing the “Vibrance” much further than I usually push it didn’t make much of a difference. I really should try another example, and try to get them closer together…