This is incredible. There are soooo many features that Davinci already handles so damn well when it comes to color editing, that I only wish they existed in photo editors. To the point there were people posting videos on Youtube about hacky workflows to edit RAW photo files on Resolve and export each one as JPG files haha.
Only Darktable seemed to push the technical capabilities of photo editing forward (AgX, parametric masks, tone equalizer, etc), while rest of "industry standard" software lagged behind for quite so long, stagnant. Even more so when it comes to "creative" ways of editing, which Video Editing software have adopted for years but photo editors didn't (relight, actual LUT usage without complications, film emulation, halation, other aesthetic effects like VHS film damage, etc).
There's so much we can do. To me, it seems like these sort of conservative culture (photography) vs progressive (video editing). I've been into both worlds, and for some reason video editing software and professionals were much eager to try new stuff and celebrate new ways to shape visuals, compared to photographers.
The short of it is that there’s no money in photography, compared to videography.
Movies routinely have 8 or 9 digit budgets, with teams of hundreds of people who have to collaborate to make footage coming from dozens of different cameras look seamless and consistent. Meanwhile, $1M would be an insane budget for a photo shoot.
You can see this in the actual skills of people working in the field as well. Anyone working in video has a solid understanding of the technical underpinnings of their craft. On the other hand, it’s not uncommon for working photographers to not understand some really basic stuff about color science/data formats/etc.
> Only Darktable seemed to push the technical capabilities of photo editing forward (AgX, parametric masks, tone equalizer, etc)
As a casual photographer, I wanted to love darktable and I'm sure it's extremely capable. But the UI is just so hard to get to grips with. I've put a few hours into it, tried following some tutorials etc. but I have no idea what I'm doing there.
I do have a fairly decent grasp of color science from working in 3d graphics so it's not that I'm lacking there. I guess it's like blender of yore. It could become mainstream but it would require a full UI overhaul and in the meantime it's for experts only, or determined people with a lot more time on their hands than I have.
Yeah, the UI in darktable is not good enough to go through a large shoot. When I've tried to use it I always end up doing all my selection in PhotoMechanic and then in darktable I just do editing. But even that UI/UX is terrible.
Photoshop can do anything that you mentioned for many years now.
I wish using Darkroom more, but it is terrible in defaults. It's one of those software that is developed by enthusiastic programmers but ignore actual needs of photographers. You don't need tons of demosaic algorithms but none reliable selection tool.
Darktable is great, but notably, it doesn't have any neural network-based denoising, even though that's now standard in Lightroom, Capture One, and other apps. Darktable only has rather outdated wavelet and non-local means denoising. So a photo that would be perfectly fine at ISO 6400 in other apps will still look grainy, or worse, splotchy in Darktable.
I know you have a whole narrative going but there's gotta be millions of "make my picture look analog" filters, that was the whole premise of Instagram, you can get specific effects for pictures to look like all kinds of specific cameras, so mentioning VHS like esthetics as something that doesn't exist is very strange.
I'm saying the things mentioned exist and gave example of one of the most popular consumer applications in the whole world already offering an entry level version of the same feature. Since that's what most people know about.
You have all those features already in professional photo software already as well. DaVinci is cool but it doesn't unlock anything like "make my photo look like VHS" that hasn't existed for decades by now.
Cautiosly looking forward to it. I shoot with A9 III (global shutter camera that makes 120fps _RAW photos_), and dealing with thousands of photos per shoot is a challenge. I don't use Adobe products and still looking for a good stack for photos processing, but it's an uphill battle.
For culling there is nothing better than Photo Mechanic. Worth every penny. For editing, surprisingly, the best solution (performance/features wise) I found is Photomator (recently acquired by Apple). The trick though is not to import RAWs into Photomator, but import into Apple's photo library first (so it doesn't copy RAW files from SSD and doesn't not sync with gallery ofc), and Photomator picks it up natively.
Performance/features wise this stack works fine, but it's a constant juggling with 3 apps, which makes if far from perfect.
Curious to try DaVinci Photo and see how it handles large collections of RAWs and how practical it is to use.
This was bound to happen. I've edited stills in Resolve for years thinking this day would come. Resolve has supported DNG raw files (as long as they're not converted from funky sensors such as Fujifilm X-trans). But, it was always a bit of a hack.
Kind of stoked to see this release even though I've transitioned to a 100% open source photo workflow on Linux now.
IMO, most exciting developments in photo editing today happens in open source. But this is really something.
How do they actual make money? I've been using Resolve for years without paying for it (and without thinking about its business model too much). It seems that they sell quite expensive professional hardware so I assume the software users are just compensated by hardware users?
I used to work at Blackmagic, wrote some of the peripheral code around BRAW and did some work with the Resolve guys up in Singapore.
Used to have lunch regularly with one of the owners too. Need to check in with him again!
At least back in 2019, BMD made a lot of money selling professional licences for DaVinci Resolve. I don't know exact figures but that part of the business was healthily profitable of its own accord. Very, very healthily profitable!
Most parts of the business were profitable standalone, AFAIK. Their model didn't revolve around loss leaders, burning VC money or anything like that; just selling good products at fair prices and making bank.
I think a big part of it was a fairly lean culture (whole company was bootstrapped and grown sustainably), and specifically in the case of DaVinci they bought out an existing business that had already done a lot of the development and marketing work for absolute peanuts.
Yep, I don't remember a whole lot about them though.
(Actually, anyone else from BMD here? Was that the product that the Industrial Designers won second place in the design awards for, losing out to the accessible playground?)
Hardware. It's like the Apple model (before they got into services). They sell a full suite of hardware that works great with their software, and they see the software as a way to keep good will, and also showcase their tech well.
They also sell a paid version, if you want a few extra features.
Their hardware is deeply reliable, affordable, and you can see that they have super solid software chops.
I made the unconventional choice of using a Blackmagic Micro Studio 4K camera for a robotic application and it turned out to be a not crazy choice - we get our choice of lenses and they have controllable focus and zoom, there's a REST API for the camera (which can connect to Ethernet), etc. To speak nothing of the crisp image. And that I can pick one up in 30 minutes at B&H (in NYC).
Industrial vision cameras can cost ~the same but you'll want to rip your hair out before you get to grab an image (or change the focus - sorry, that's mostly never possible).
Huge, huge fan of Blackmagic. The rock-solid free editing software is just cherry on top.
We use the SDI output (that cable is sturdy and the bnc lock connector is rock solid) and a Blackmagic 12G SDI to HDMI converter, and then an El Gato HDMI capture card.
Intuitively, I’d say most of the delay is coming from the HDMI capture side (it’s a pretty cheap usb dongle).
Yep, I was at a broadcaster when we bought a whole pack of their SDI capture cards... the only ones on the market really (everyone else wanted to sell you massively expensive enterprise "appliances") for a very affordable price (I believe they were like 500$ a piece for 4 SDI inputs?).
Also they were first to sell us USB3 based HDMI capture devices that we could take around and do live capture from cameras at full HD for also a pretty affordable price (around 1000$?).
Whenever we needed affordable (semi) professional gear, they were consistently the ones to look at.
That and I imagine the overwhelming majority of professional users pay for the Studio license. It has a few quality of life things that are a total no-brainer when you use it to make money and/or are paying the person using it.
Meanwhile, I wish BMD would take a step back and do the housecleaning that Resolve so desperately needs. They threw a bunch of purchased products together on different pages and called it "integrated," when in fact the integration is buggy and janky.
The #1 thing they need to do is integrate all the nodeviews. A single nodeview for all processing would make Resolve a truly groundbreaking product, and undoubtedly eliminate a lot of bugs.
The Affinity suite was made free to use, with optional paid "AI" features behind a subscription. The betrayal was probably against the promise of a perpetual license sustained not by subscription.
It is not entirely clear to me from reading TFA, but infer from its description and other comments here that Photo only works with RAW input files. Is this correct? Or can I use it on JPEGs?
I always try out new photo editors but I've kept coming back to LR because of familiarity + number of presets / plugin (Dehancer) that I've bought. I think there should be some presets converter somewhere that helps us with moving to other software, not much can be done for plugin though. regardless I'm a happy user of Davinci Resolve and this is amazing!
> The Photo page gives you everything you need to manage your entire image library from import to completion. You can import photos directly, from your Apple Photos library or Lightroom, and organize them with tags, ratings, favorites and keywords for fast, flexible management of even the largest libraries.
This is how they're going to win over LR users. It always comes back to it not just being a decent photo editor, it's also a library management tool. Beyond good organization, If you're non-destructively editing photos and not wanting to render out every single artifact, then you need a tool that can you show the library and dynamically render the edits.
It's nice experimenting with different editors, but having library management is turning into more of what keeps me shelling out. I'll have to check this out more.
> ...library management is turning into more of what keeps me shelling out.
Library management whas how Lightroom got started. Back in ~2005 or so when the first betas came out that was the big selling point and why I and other photographers jumped on it. Back then, the editing tools in Lightoom were still behind photoshop, but the library management was intuitive and fast.
The other comparable tool (at the time) is PhotoMechanic, but that one is quite different in terms of library management, though far superior to Lightroom in many regards. But it isn't very functional as an overall library tool IMO.
Wow, this looks incredible- Capture One has really not been innovating, is slow, the library can’t handle 40k raws, and with Lightroom, edits seem slightly worse.
The cinematic color grading seems super cool, can’t wait to give this a try.
I’ve returned to Canon Desktop photo Pro for processing raw, but it’s clunky and Windows and only does canon raw (though I kind of get that). I’m trying DXO on windows some good gpu acceleration, but no Linux. I’ve moved most of my work to Linux, and I did try raw therapy and darktable but it wasn’t intuitive enough and i had to tweak a lot. I’ll pay for a light room alternative (which I bought years ago.. they don’t support new cameras which is how they get you to upgrade.)
Davinci Resolve has been great product for both free and paid version but atm I'm not using it since they require nvidia graphics(CUDA) for linux usage, unfortunately
It's crazy that the RAW photo processing market is so underserved that a video editor can add on photo capabilities and it's immediately in the top 3 photo editors.
I mean, they all process image data, so it had that going for it, but I'm still disappointed Apple gave up on Aperture, then nobody really innovated after that, in terms of library management and workflows.
Darktable does a lot of things that are conceptually similar to what DaVinci Resolve is likely doing here.
One of the big things Darktable has been pushing for a few years is moving from the now deprecated display-referred workflow to a scene-referred one. The key idea is that you keep the image in something closer to the original scene as captured by the camera for as long as possible, instead of rendering it early into output-referred display space such as sRGB. With raw files that matters, because many editing operations behave very differently depending on where in the pipeline they happen.
That is a bit different from how tools like Adobe Lightroom tend to work. The main problem with display-referred workflows is not just reduced precision, but that you can end up clipping information and applying nonlinear transforms too early. Once that happens, later edits are working against damage that has effectively already been baked into the pipeline. So subtle tone mapping tweaks can push colors out of gamut, for example. There are a lot of ways to deal with that obviously and Adobe does a nice job of balancing tradeoffs. But they do remove a lot of choice and control from the process.
The UX tradeoff in Darktable is that module order matters a lot and there are a lot of different modules that do similar things in different ways. You can adjust modules in any order you like, but the processing order itself is usually best left alone. That is a leaky abstraction: it is hard to explain why the order matters unless you already understand what the pipeline is doing. And of course Darktable now allows reordering because there are sometimes valid reasons to do that. But that also means users can easily make things worse if they start changing the order without understanding the consequences.
But for simple editing, Darktable is actually really nice these days. I have some auto applied modules with rules for camera type and a few other things. Mostly it looks alright without me doing much. One of its strong points is rule based application of particular edits based on camera or lens. With my Fuji, it needs a little exposure correction because it under exposes intentionally to protect highlights for example.
There are quite a lot of companies competing for the raw image editing market currently. It’s sad that none of the open source options are particularly good.
This honestly made my day. I’ve been looking for a way to manage my photos on Linux for a while. Lightroom has been the only reason I’ve stuck with a Mac.
If I can switch to a photo editor that lets me process everything properly, skip the monthly subscription, and not have Adobe tracking all over my system—that’s exactly what I want.
This feels like a dream come true. Really amazing.
I'm in a similar camp where I'm stucking to windows for that one software: lightroom classic (or CC as they call it). I'm happy to pay for a legitimate replacement that lets me go Linux native on a laptop. I'm fine even paying for the Adobe Cancellation tax from the money I save not buying Windows.
Yes DaVinci Resolve is supported on Linux. Unfortunately the free version of DaVinci Resolve does not include H.264/H.265/AAC support on Linux due to codec licensing issues though you can transcode it elsewhere first.
Does this support Fusion as well? I've done photo editing using a fusion workflow before and while clunky it was the only program that could reasonably accommodate my needs at the time.
I've been editing my videos by transcription for the past two years. Can edit very quickly. Takes about 2 hours to edit a one hour video. It's actually faster than working with an editor.
that's just a funny claim from multiple angles. a professional editor working with professional shot footage is an entirely different creature than someone that can work with a pile of footage with no guidance to create something. feature film editors are different from documentary film editors which would be closer to content creators.
a professional editor will take longer as they are laughing/crying about the dumpster fire of footage dumped into their bay. a content creator is just going to yolo jump cut their way through it with absolutely no regards for the same criteria a professional editor would be looking for. you know, things like continuity, different angles, cut away shots and other things to make a clean edit. so yeah, something you just taped on your system with no regards to normal production quality will take a professional editor longer just to get their head wrapped around it.
Only Darktable seemed to push the technical capabilities of photo editing forward (AgX, parametric masks, tone equalizer, etc), while rest of "industry standard" software lagged behind for quite so long, stagnant. Even more so when it comes to "creative" ways of editing, which Video Editing software have adopted for years but photo editors didn't (relight, actual LUT usage without complications, film emulation, halation, other aesthetic effects like VHS film damage, etc).
There's so much we can do. To me, it seems like these sort of conservative culture (photography) vs progressive (video editing). I've been into both worlds, and for some reason video editing software and professionals were much eager to try new stuff and celebrate new ways to shape visuals, compared to photographers.
Movies routinely have 8 or 9 digit budgets, with teams of hundreds of people who have to collaborate to make footage coming from dozens of different cameras look seamless and consistent. Meanwhile, $1M would be an insane budget for a photo shoot.
You can see this in the actual skills of people working in the field as well. Anyone working in video has a solid understanding of the technical underpinnings of their craft. On the other hand, it’s not uncommon for working photographers to not understand some really basic stuff about color science/data formats/etc.
As a casual photographer, I wanted to love darktable and I'm sure it's extremely capable. But the UI is just so hard to get to grips with. I've put a few hours into it, tried following some tutorials etc. but I have no idea what I'm doing there.
I do have a fairly decent grasp of color science from working in 3d graphics so it's not that I'm lacking there. I guess it's like blender of yore. It could become mainstream but it would require a full UI overhaul and in the meantime it's for experts only, or determined people with a lot more time on their hands than I have.
I wish using Darkroom more, but it is terrible in defaults. It's one of those software that is developed by enthusiastic programmers but ignore actual needs of photographers. You don't need tons of demosaic algorithms but none reliable selection tool.
Let alone the other things listed.
You have all those features already in professional photo software already as well. DaVinci is cool but it doesn't unlock anything like "make my photo look like VHS" that hasn't existed for decades by now.
For culling there is nothing better than Photo Mechanic. Worth every penny. For editing, surprisingly, the best solution (performance/features wise) I found is Photomator (recently acquired by Apple). The trick though is not to import RAWs into Photomator, but import into Apple's photo library first (so it doesn't copy RAW files from SSD and doesn't not sync with gallery ofc), and Photomator picks it up natively.
Performance/features wise this stack works fine, but it's a constant juggling with 3 apps, which makes if far from perfect.
Curious to try DaVinci Photo and see how it handles large collections of RAWs and how practical it is to use.
Kind of stoked to see this release even though I've transitioned to a 100% open source photo workflow on Linux now.
IMO, most exciting developments in photo editing today happens in open source. But this is really something.
[1] https://darktable.org
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47761280
Used to have lunch regularly with one of the owners too. Need to check in with him again!
At least back in 2019, BMD made a lot of money selling professional licences for DaVinci Resolve. I don't know exact figures but that part of the business was healthily profitable of its own accord. Very, very healthily profitable!
Most parts of the business were profitable standalone, AFAIK. Their model didn't revolve around loss leaders, burning VC money or anything like that; just selling good products at fair prices and making bank.
I think a big part of it was a fairly lean culture (whole company was bootstrapped and grown sustainably), and specifically in the case of DaVinci they bought out an existing business that had already done a lot of the development and marketing work for absolute peanuts.
Very smart team doing good work.
(Actually, anyone else from BMD here? Was that the product that the Industrial Designers won second place in the design awards for, losing out to the accessible playground?)
They also sell a paid version, if you want a few extra features.
I made the unconventional choice of using a Blackmagic Micro Studio 4K camera for a robotic application and it turned out to be a not crazy choice - we get our choice of lenses and they have controllable focus and zoom, there's a REST API for the camera (which can connect to Ethernet), etc. To speak nothing of the crisp image. And that I can pick one up in 30 minutes at B&H (in NYC).
Industrial vision cameras can cost ~the same but you'll want to rip your hair out before you get to grab an image (or change the focus - sorry, that's mostly never possible).
Huge, huge fan of Blackmagic. The rock-solid free editing software is just cherry on top.
We use the SDI output (that cable is sturdy and the bnc lock connector is rock solid) and a Blackmagic 12G SDI to HDMI converter, and then an El Gato HDMI capture card.
Intuitively, I’d say most of the delay is coming from the HDMI capture side (it’s a pretty cheap usb dongle).
Also they were first to sell us USB3 based HDMI capture devices that we could take around and do live capture from cameras at full HD for also a pretty affordable price (around 1000$?).
Whenever we needed affordable (semi) professional gear, they were consistently the ones to look at.
And the great thing about the paid version is that updates are (so far) free with no subscription bs.
I paid for it once like 10 years ago and still get every new version for free.
Meanwhile, I wish BMD would take a step back and do the housecleaning that Resolve so desperately needs. They threw a bunch of purchased products together on different pages and called it "integrated," when in fact the integration is buggy and janky.
The #1 thing they need to do is integrate all the nodeviews. A single nodeview for all processing would make Resolve a truly groundbreaking product, and undoubtedly eliminate a lot of bugs.
I've been using DaVinci Resolve as my desktop video editor for years, and it's great, can highly recommend it as well.
This is how they're going to win over LR users. It always comes back to it not just being a decent photo editor, it's also a library management tool. Beyond good organization, If you're non-destructively editing photos and not wanting to render out every single artifact, then you need a tool that can you show the library and dynamically render the edits.
It's nice experimenting with different editors, but having library management is turning into more of what keeps me shelling out. I'll have to check this out more.
Library management whas how Lightroom got started. Back in ~2005 or so when the first betas came out that was the big selling point and why I and other photographers jumped on it. Back then, the editing tools in Lightoom were still behind photoshop, but the library management was intuitive and fast.
The other comparable tool (at the time) is PhotoMechanic, but that one is quite different in terms of library management, though far superior to Lightroom in many regards. But it isn't very functional as an overall library tool IMO.
The cinematic color grading seems super cool, can’t wait to give this a try.
I’ve returned to Canon Desktop photo Pro for processing raw, but it’s clunky and Windows and only does canon raw (though I kind of get that). I’m trying DXO on windows some good gpu acceleration, but no Linux. I’ve moved most of my work to Linux, and I did try raw therapy and darktable but it wasn’t intuitive enough and i had to tweak a lot. I’ll pay for a light room alternative (which I bought years ago.. they don’t support new cameras which is how they get you to upgrade.)
I mean, they all process image data, so it had that going for it, but I'm still disappointed Apple gave up on Aperture, then nobody really innovated after that, in terms of library management and workflows.
One of the big things Darktable has been pushing for a few years is moving from the now deprecated display-referred workflow to a scene-referred one. The key idea is that you keep the image in something closer to the original scene as captured by the camera for as long as possible, instead of rendering it early into output-referred display space such as sRGB. With raw files that matters, because many editing operations behave very differently depending on where in the pipeline they happen.
That is a bit different from how tools like Adobe Lightroom tend to work. The main problem with display-referred workflows is not just reduced precision, but that you can end up clipping information and applying nonlinear transforms too early. Once that happens, later edits are working against damage that has effectively already been baked into the pipeline. So subtle tone mapping tweaks can push colors out of gamut, for example. There are a lot of ways to deal with that obviously and Adobe does a nice job of balancing tradeoffs. But they do remove a lot of choice and control from the process.
The UX tradeoff in Darktable is that module order matters a lot and there are a lot of different modules that do similar things in different ways. You can adjust modules in any order you like, but the processing order itself is usually best left alone. That is a leaky abstraction: it is hard to explain why the order matters unless you already understand what the pipeline is doing. And of course Darktable now allows reordering because there are sometimes valid reasons to do that. But that also means users can easily make things worse if they start changing the order without understanding the consequences.
But for simple editing, Darktable is actually really nice these days. I have some auto applied modules with rules for camera type and a few other things. Mostly it looks alright without me doing much. One of its strong points is rule based application of particular edits based on camera or lens. With my Fuji, it needs a little exposure correction because it under exposes intentionally to protect highlights for example.
If I can switch to a photo editor that lets me process everything properly, skip the monthly subscription, and not have Adobe tracking all over my system—that’s exactly what I want.
This feels like a dream come true. Really amazing.
On that note, is this supported on Linux?
Native photo editor with decent ux was the missing piece.
I've been editing my videos by transcription for the past two years. Can edit very quickly. Takes about 2 hours to edit a one hour video. It's actually faster than working with an editor.
what does this mean? it is an editor
a professional editor will take longer as they are laughing/crying about the dumpster fire of footage dumped into their bay. a content creator is just going to yolo jump cut their way through it with absolutely no regards for the same criteria a professional editor would be looking for. you know, things like continuity, different angles, cut away shots and other things to make a clean edit. so yeah, something you just taped on your system with no regards to normal production quality will take a professional editor longer just to get their head wrapped around it.
I also like the cloud backup and sync that Lightroom has. But I swear it gets slower and slower with every update.
Having a proper choice that is not Adobe or Affinity is a win for every amateur like myself working with videos and photos.