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DaVinci Resolve – Photo

1147 points by thebiblelover7 6mo ago

dcliu 6mo ago
DaVinci Resolve has been an incredible value. Hoping this becomes a viable contender vs Capture One and Lightroom.
pier25 6mo ago
Pretty cool. Would be great if you could use it on its own app instead of having to load a Resolve project.
amanzi 6mo ago
Nice. And this should be fully supported on Linux too, I hope.
- GrayShade 6mo ago
  It only supports CUDA on Linux.
__mharrison__ 6mo ago
Davinci resolve studio is awesome. 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.
- dylan604 6mo ago
  > It's actually faster than working with an editor. what does this mean? it is an editor
  - cuu508 6mo ago
    Faster than to work with a human person who edits your videos.
    - dylan604 6mo ago
      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.
  - pinkmuffinere 6mo ago
    Ya, I’m also confused. Maybe they mean it’s faster than handing it off a (professional) human editor?
- __mharrison__ 6mo ago
  Folks were confused by my comment. I've created courses for most well known technical course providers. Some do all the editing for you. Others make you do the editing. Some do "in between". Where they do some edits but then ask you to validate, etc. That middle group has always been annoying because it has been a huge context shift. By the time I go through their questions, it's typically easier for me to do the full edit myself. No, I'm not editing a feature length movie.
mturilin 6mo ago
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.
- InfinityByTen 6mo ago
  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. On that note, is this supported on Linux?
  - tech234a 6mo ago
    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.
    - hulk-konen 6mo ago
      I think this will be the year of the Linux then. Native photo editor with decent ux was the missing piece.
      - InfinityByTen 6mo ago
        I'm so eager to try this out today after work. I heard a lot of things about Darktable, but then it didn't really feel like the alternative to Lightroom I'd hope for.
    - joseluis 6mo ago
      Even the paid version doesn't include aac support in Linux so you have to transcode the audio from videos recorded from your phone, with ffmpeg for example, prior to opening them with resolve. That's the biggest inconvenience it has for me in Linux. And plugins can't solve that either, because apparently can only add codecs for encoding, not for decoding.
buildbot 6mo ago
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.
internetter 6mo ago
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.
- Eingin 6mo ago
  Yes fusion is supported too! I've seen some demos of people using it for basic spot removal etc. There is a ton of insane potential there!
LewisVerstappen 6mo ago
[flagged]
acomjean 6mo ago
This looks good. 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.)
raincole 6mo ago
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?
- adzm 6mo ago
  Premium features in the paid software as well
- geerlingguy 6mo ago
  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.
  - gregsadetsky 6mo ago
    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.
    - modeless 6mo ago
      Interesting! How is the latency of this camera?
      - gregsadetsky 6mo ago
geerlingguy 6mo ago
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.
- dylan604 6mo ago
  that's funny. before it was a video editor, it was an image color correction suite for RAW.
- Gigachad 6mo ago
  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.
- jillesvangurp 6mo ago
  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.
bryanhogan 6mo ago
This is an amazing announcement! I've been looking for a good replacement since the Affinity betrayal. I've been using DaVinci Resolve as my desktop video editor for years, and it's great, can highly recommend it as well.
- snowe2010 6mo ago
  What affinity betrayal?
  - jack1243star 6mo ago
    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.
    - Arn_Thor 6mo ago
      This was news to me. Very sad news indeed. I see now they were bought by Canva. That explains it...
andrew2025 6mo ago
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mikae1 6mo ago
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.
- jez 6mo ago
  What is your Linux photo editing software of choice?
  - mikae1 6mo ago
    darktable[1] and Spektrafilm[2]. [1] https://darktable.org https://darktable.org [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47761280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47761280
    - 8-prime 6mo ago
      Damn, there really are no original ideas anymore. I have been working on essentially the exact thing that Spektrafilm is doing. I'll check that out to see how I can improve my setup.
- MrDrMcCoy 6mo ago
  I tried several times to get Resolve to take my DNG sequences for video (as produced by my Sigma fp), but it only brings them in with very broken and washed out lighting. No combination of settings I've tried either imports them correctly or gives me enough leeway to post-correct them into something usable. Lightworks can handle them better, but is a lot less flexible in color correction, and I don't want to deal with their subscription model.
nekiwo 6mo ago
Now we just need a proper replacement for After Effects on Linux and I will stop dualbooting.
- 4k93n2 6mo ago
  is davinci fusion not an after effects alternative? or is it not at the same level?
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - whywhywhywhy 6mo ago
    There’s crossover in that they both do compositing but AE uniquely has a lot of other things from the motion graphics side that just doesn’t exist anywhere else.
    - teovall 6mo ago
      Does the integration of Krokodove into Resolve 21 close that gap at all?
  - alfirous 6mo ago
    In my experience, it's not easy as After Effects. Though for simple VFX, motion or animation is doable. For me best alternative to AE is Blender.
    - falkensmaize 6mo ago
      Yeah this is the way. Blender has a higher learning curve than AE but it’s ultimately much better at actual 3d than AE is, and the recent improvements to the interface have made it a lot more usable.
- ch_fr 6mo ago
  Fusion has great potential, but is probably being held back by a lack of community support, the slightly-higher-barrier-of-entry of node-based workflows, and the subtle but annoying ways in which the software can work against you. TLDR: it does some stuff slower than ae, but nodes allows it to very easily do a lot of stuff that ae struggles with. It's also a lot easier to parse since node->properties is less nested than comp->layers->effects->properties (and this makes a big difference on cognitive load).
arecsu 6mo ago
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.
- esperent 6mo ago
  > 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.
  - Maxion 6mo ago
    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.
    - FireBeyond 6mo ago
LandenLove 6mo ago
Please release me from Adobe Lightroom.
- axelriet 6mo ago
  One thing that LR does well is leverage Adobe Camera Raw and its great support for many raw formats.
  - LandenLove 6mo ago
    I like how Lightroom simplifies a lot of the editing process. Alternatives like Rawtherpee are very intimidating. I also like the cloud backup and sync that Lightroom has. But I swear it gets slower and slower with every update.
  - 9x39 6mo ago
    And adding newly released lens correction profiles. It's nice to have a lot of things just work.
- Mario9382 6mo ago
  My annual Adobe subscription expires in 15 days and I'm here gathering all possible alternatives. This is my last year giving them money after all dark patterns they use so you pay / don't leave.
- eeiaeaa 6mo ago
  Hobby photographer here, so take that into account. My workflow is very simple. I moved from Windows and Adobe LightRoom to Fedora Linux with KDE Plasma, using DigiKam for downloading and organizing photos, and RawTherapee for RAW editing. I use GIMP here and there for occasional touch-ups. It's not as smooth as LightRoom and there is a learning curve, but you are gaining independence.
robertwt7 6mo ago
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!
- Pyrodogg 6mo ago
  > 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.
  - Maxion 6mo ago
    > ...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.
  - atombender 6mo ago
    As a long-term Lightroom user (who's never used DaVinci Resolve before), to me this doesn't look like it's positioned to compete with LR as a primary photo library/editor tool. If that is their goal, then I think it's a huge failure. What they've done is add photo support to Resolve, which is still primarily a video tool. All the video stuff is there — most parts of the UI is oriented around video clips and video editing. The photo editing is kind of buried in there. Compared to Lightroom, this doesn't seem like it's designed to be a real library management tool, let alone a DAM. Lightroom has very good support for previews, decoupling the library metadata from the physical media, and so on.
brontosaurusrex 6mo ago
Ok, I will have to take my time to figure out why the valid license is not starting my resolve on offline machine now.
ilsubyeega 6mo ago
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
- d3Xt3r 6mo ago
  Maybe there's a way to get it working with ZLUDA?
VerifiedReports 6mo ago
Looks more useful than the Cut page. 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.
- armandososa 6mo ago
  Amigo! If you're not a professional video editor but you have to, occasionally, make long videos shorter or just remove awkward silences, etc., the cut page is a godsend. You grab the knife tool, bim, bam, boom, you're done.
  - VerifiedReports 6mo ago
    You can do that on the Edit page.
    - rimliu 6mo ago
      and you kinda can eat soup with a knife.
      - VerifiedReports 6mo ago
        likewise more effective than the Cut page.
mmaunder 6mo ago
BM stills camera coming soon. It would replicate their video model with their software driving their hardware sales.
qsi 6mo ago
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?
- teovall 6mo ago
  Yes, it works with JPEG, HEIF, PNG, TIFF, AF, PSD, and several other still image formats.
Jamesbeam 6mo ago
I really like what BMD is doing. Disappointed with all the companies starting with A. Having a proper choice that is not Adobe or Affinity is a win for every amateur like myself working with videos and photos.
- Forgeties79 6mo ago
  I switched my department over to resolve studio about 2 years ago and we’ve never regretted it. We use the NLE and fusion components constantly. Fairlight is a bit meh still but otherwise we’re very happy. Premiere was such a pain
divan 6mo ago
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.
- divan 6mo ago
  While we're on topic, I've been using DaVinci with this camera for a slightly unusual hybrid process. With a good light and lens I shoot slow-mo video (240fps FullHD or 120fps 4K) with shutter speed of 1/1000. Then I can take any frame and save it as a photo directly from Davinci. I wrote 2 scripts for that: - first is for keyboard shortcut that automates "Switch to color tab, Grab a still, Save a still to folder, Switch back" - second for more advanced workflow where I put markers on the frames I like, and then it uses Fusion's Saver node to save images as EXR This flow is even faster than culling with Photo Mechanic. In both cases I get 10bit PNG or EXR images that I can import into the photo editor. Workflow is far from the perfect yet, as it might need some adjustment when working with Log profile or different FPS (for 2nd script). But aside of giving me an option of "shooting" video+photos at the same time, it blows my mind that it's practically "shoot photos 240 times per second and choose later", and how good the end result is. The bitrate of video is 280Mbps (4:2:2, 10bit) and while video compression quality is not negligible, the resulting "still photos"'s quality is more than enough for social media purpose. Photo example [1] [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/13So6ZuVx3dn2jZCw7cm3LkbzydF3d_uA/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/13So6ZuVx3dn2jZCw7cm3LkbzydF...
- tecleandor 6mo ago
  What are you doing with Photomechanic since the price raise, change to subscriptions, and deprecation of the Plus version? Are you using an old version or have you moved to the subscriptions?
cetinsert 6mo ago
The word Hollywood has such a strong negative charge at this point that I cannot believe they stick to using it in marketing like that.
amatecha 6mo ago
It took me a damn long time to find this information, so I'm pasting it here: > It includes native RAW support for Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, Sony and even iPhone ProRAW. I looked all over for a more technical page that just lists these kind of specs in bullet-point form, but apparently they refuse to communicate information about their product in this way? The "Tech Specs" page only seems to show information about hardware products. /shrug Would be cool to have something I can use to edit my Fujifilm-shot photos without any sort of subscription. Capture One Express (or whatever it's called now) is super light on features, but processes Fujifilm .RAF's very well (oh, or it used to, apparently it's permanently discontinued now, great). I'd love to use Lightroom but I refuse to pay for a subscription to use software, so... options are limited :\
- IndrekR 6mo ago
  Have you tried Affinity Photo?
  - petepete 6mo ago
    Affinity is great for editing but doesn't do the library management stuff that Capture One/Lightroom etc do.
  - amatecha 6mo ago
    I haven't, but based on the history summarized in this post[0] I'm guessing they will soon force everyone into their subscriptions anyways [0] https://mg0x7be.github.io/affinity-enshittification-how-canvas-four-pledges-aged-like-milk.html https://mg0x7be.github.io/affinity-enshittification-how-canv...
- jjbinx007 6mo ago
  I have a Lumix camera which doesn't have support for Raw files but apparently you can just use the free Adobe DNG converter and it works well. It should work for your Fuji Raws too.
  - sanitycheck 6mo ago
jdboyd 6mo ago
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has loading images into Resolve before for this very purpose, so I'm interested in trying this at some point. There is a bunch of other stuff I think is interesting in this release's marketting as well. For instance. OGraf, a new EBU standard for HTML in motion graphics systems, as well as Lottie animation support. The AI blemish remover looks interesting. The AI content search looks interesting. AI Slate ID looks interesting, although I've never actually used a slate. I'm less thrilled to see an AI speech generator though. There is now Vertical Resolution support. Not something I have particularly wanted to do, but I can see it being useful to a lot of people. Also, the new Picture in Picture tool looks like it might be a time saver, as someone who does a lot of people talking next to slides.
dfordp11 6mo ago
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jzer0cool 6mo ago
I missed if the collaboration portion can be self-hosted, or is it available via some API access. Anyone know?
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
wg0 6mo ago
Just curious - what UI library they use for their user interfaces?
- JoshStrobl 6mo ago
  As far as I know, it's their own in-house solution (not fltk, gtk, qt, etc.)
curioussquirrel 6mo ago
Thanks for sharing! Have been begrudgingly using Darktable since that seems to be your best option on Linux, but the UI/UX never really clicked with me. I wish this was opensource but I will give this a shot (pun intended) for sure.
HelloUsername 6mo ago
Is there a way to only download the Photo editor software part? It seems its immediately bundled with all other video and audio tools and effects
- sudonem 6mo ago
  No. It’s a component of Davinci Resolve, not an isolated binary. It’s not likely ever to be offered as a standalone app. That’s just not how Resolve is designed.
yieldcrv 6mo ago
I currently use photopea.com for a Photoshop interface to do cosmetic edits and logos Could check this out Might be the final nail in the coffin for my creative cloud subscription
northernsausage 6mo ago
I honestly hope there is a whole suite of middle and upper management at Adobe sweating right now. I'll wait for the reviews but this looks like a total win for me as 90% stills and already using resolve for the other 10% and having had 10 years of Adobe bleeding me dry whilst basically not developing Lightroom (the only tool I need) I am looking to jump, no LEAP from their subscription service.
googie 6mo ago
I wish they (authors of DaVinci Resolve and the Photo Editor) paid more attention to Linux platform. Theoretically DaVinci Resolve runs on Linux, but getting it run is a very bad experience on Ubuntu/Kubuntu 24.04. I even paid for the DaVinci license, as I read somewhere that for Linux it's necessary in order to have all codecs supported. It did not help. Fortunately there were no problems with refund. There are whole guides online how to walk around these issues and even then I could not get the audio working. Somehow it relies on some old ALSA API, which is no longer maintained/supported on Ubuntu/Kubuntu, or I'm just too stupid to make it work. AI assistants could not provide working solution for me either. I've moved back to Linux a year ago after around 10 years of Windows (and I used to use Linux Slackware for ~15 years beforehand). I am amazed how big progress the KDE made and whole Linux ecosystem. Gaming these days is just as easy as on Windows, which was my primary reason to switch to Windows. My printer just works now. Even music production is excellent on Linux now. There is plenty of great software options to choose from and they just work - as I would expect from the mature ecosystem. This all feels so good, given how Linux is not pushing trash into my computer (OS-bound spyware/bloatware), has excellent, customizable UI. Full freedom. I do feel that I own my hardware. Yet I miss DaVinci Resolve. For now I use Kdenlive, which is nice for simple editing, but feels unfinished, or I just don't know how to use it correctly.
- anal_reactor 6mo ago
  Exactly my thought. On Windows I used the free version for casual video editing and making memes. On Linux it just doesn't work. I managed to somehow fix the audio problem, then it had issues with codecs, and in general it was very miserable experience.
- roygdavis 6mo ago
  I got it working with the help of Gemini, here's my chat if you want to try again <https://gemini.google.com/share/50fa089e2f2c https://gemini.google.com/share/50fa089e2f2c>
  - googie 6mo ago
    Thanks, but as far as I read it, it's all about the library file names mismatch, which is mostly covered by guides I mentioned earlier. I've done that and I got my DaVinci running. It was just audio output that did not work, despite hours spent on trying to get it work.
te_chris 6mo ago
I only pay adobe because, as an amateur, I can dump in raw files and they then make them go away from my hd. It's wild that no one else offers this, but that seems to be where we are. How does BM cloud work in this regard? Can we dump a card straight in, have it sync, edit, export etc and never think about the files again?
agos 6mo ago
if the camera profiles are good (or they support third party profiling) this could easily become my go to, but that's a big if
danbruc 6mo ago
Complete tangent, what is going on with this image [1]? Render? AI? Too much post-processing? It has some computer game graphics look to me, but I can not quite put the finger on what seems off. [1] https://images.blackmagicdesign.com/images/products/davinciresolve/photo/hardware/hardware-md.jpg?_v=1775692984 https://images.blackmagicdesign.com/images/products/davincir...
- miksuko 6mo ago
  Ridiculously engineered studio lighting and HDR, I would suppose. Stuff can start looking very artificial when you start bringing in good equipment.
  - goldenarm 6mo ago
    We may be witnessing a fascinating trend : AI images are making professional-grade imagery look like spam, and natural lighting and blurry images are becoming the new "human" esthetic.
    - yieldcrv 6mo ago
      the last two generations (9 months) of image models do natural lighting and blurry images really well too
- o10449366 6mo ago
  Softbox lighting and it looks off because obviously no one lights their work desk like they would for a professional photo shoot.
- dan-robertson 6mo ago
  I’m not sure if it’s AI so much as a composition of dozens of images stacked on top of each other. The shadows of different objects seem to be going in different directions.
- Kkoala 6mo ago
  Looks like a rendered scene yes
v1ne 6mo ago
Great! Brings a bit more dynamic into the market. So far, I'm happy with DxO, but I also don't need to manage a library. I don't know, does Resolve have lens corrections for 100+ lenses built-in? That's the thing that DxO does really well: Lens corrections, matching your camera's color rendering, denoising. Unfortunately, they still struggle with HDR output. I imagine the tools in Resolve save you much time, due to automation. Probably handy if you shoot a lot. Yet, the biggest difference is that in photography, you're not necessarily limited by throughput. You can and do actually put a lot of effort into single images.
alfanick 6mo ago
This is big, it works on Linux. Finally! Let me check it out Edit: ofc it couldn't be that easy, need to update some libs to make DaVinci Resolve happy.
- SomeHacker44 6mo ago
  What Linux distro did you use? Any pointers? Thanks!
  - alfanick 6mo ago
    I'm using Linux Mint 22.3 so Ubuntu 24.04... Haven't solved the problem yet - either going to install/build needed libs and use LD_* vars to point to correct libs, or pack this in Docker/Podman container (but X11 apps and docker are quite a challenge too).
unit149 6mo ago
[dead]
talkfold 6mo ago
Blackmagic's move: ship a Lightroom competitor inside software photographers already pirate for video editing. Distribution solved.
- yonatan8070 6mo ago
  Who's pirating Resolve? Doesn't it have a generous free version?
  - 8-prime 6mo ago
    It's generous but limited in some aspects. True 4k resolution is not supported (or at least wasn't the last time I checked). It also didn't support H.265 4:2:2 files. I guess once you reach the level where you need to work on these types of files, it would be warranted to pay the very reasonable price for Resolve.
  - sudonem 6mo ago
    Yes. The free version is very generous. Most non-professionals won’t ever need a license for Resolve Studio. BMD’s entire game here is that they are a hardware company first. They hook you in with some really good software - and when you start getting in to professional workflows that requires specialized hardware (I.e. capture cards, I/O devices etc) you’re locked in to needing to use BMD hardware. So it doesn’t cost them a great deal to offer the free version to most people because they have to have the software anyway to support the hardware. Also, while they certainly make a profit on the studio licenses, it seems to be largely because offering those advanced features have costs they can’t eat. For example, the official (and expensive) Apple ProRes encoder SDKs, and advanced tech behind their noise reduction plugins among others.
jayphen 6mo ago
I actually downloaded this and tried it. Am I the first one here to do that? As someone who hasn't touched DaVinci products before (but a lot of experience with LR) - I am immediately confused by the integration of photo editing here. It feels very much like video editing software with photo editing tacked on. I can imagine that this would be much more intuitive for people who are already used to using DaVinci for video editing. I can intuit from the interface that there are a lot of powerful editing opportunities here, but I feel lost in the software. I spent 15 minutes or so trying to figure out how to do simple masking, but I could not find any way to do it for photos. Obviously this is just a beta and hopefully the workflow will be improved, but unless the photo editing features are extracted in to their own software package, I don't think it's enough yet to sway me from LR (and I want so desperately to be swayed)
- _joel 6mo ago
  Isn't this aimed at people already using Resolve for video work who want to do still images too?
  - jayphen 6mo ago
    It is unclear. Their marketing material at least does imply that they are targeting photographers: > Whether you’re a professional colorist looking to apply your skills to fashion shoots and weddings, or a photographer who wants to work beyond the limits of traditional photo applications, the Photo page unlocks the tools you need
- scotty79 6mo ago
  > It feels very much like video editing software with photo editing tacked on. Isn't it exactly what it is?
  - jayphen 6mo ago
    Yes, but I think it's important to make that clear. It doesn't appear to attempt to target photographers who are not coming from a video editing background, and photographers will probably be disappointed. I do hope they split this out to a separate focused product, as the photo editing space is in dire need of more options.
headsnap_io 6mo ago
amazing how people still hire photographers in this day and age.
- manoDev 6mo ago
  People who live in the real world, not in a basement living a fake metaverse life.
- Wistar 6mo ago
  The ones that do likely first tried to do the photography themselves.
major505 6mo ago
Well, anything that takes market from Adobe and their shit licensing is good news.
lynndotpy 6mo ago
This is uncanny. Just yesterday, I was complaining about the state of photo editing software (Adobe and Google are no-gos, and Darkroom provided a thousand thorns). I wished that DaVinci had a photo editor, because I had similar pains about video editing that were resolved when I learned about DaVinci. AND it runs on Linux! It's not every night you make a wish and wake up to find out it has come true.
- finnjohnsen2 6mo ago
  The simulation says you're welcome. Haha, just kidding. This is not a simulation obviously.
thomasfl 6mo ago
Great news. One more piece of software that makes the world less reliable on A*be's expensive subscription fee based software.
T3RMINATED 6mo ago
[dead]
Forgeties79 6mo ago
Lightroom killer hopefully. I started on FCP, did FCPX, did premiere for 2 years (awful), now my production team is completely around resolve studio. I would never go back to any of the others, Resolve is clearly the superior NLE with a company that has thus far maintained pretty stellar business practices IME. I’m rooting for black magic design on this one. Adobe is a terrible company.
Archit3ch 6mo ago
As someone who doesn't edit photos: 1) How does this compare to Affinity Photo? 2) Is there an iPad version?
botanrice 6mo ago
Been spending hours over the past few months prepping to get rid of Adobe because I just cannot justify the monthly subscription cost for each new release to get slower and more bloated, pushed through with AI. Photoshop has needed a real competitor for a long time. Only thing keeping me atm is having learned Premiere Pro's workflow quite well by now. Time to change.
superxpro12 6mo ago
This is cool, but I can't help but notice the first 50% of the page has breasts featured in every photo.... Like, comeon lol. be a little less transparent about it.
- contrast 6mo ago
  That's your reaction to a page about photography that has photos of a model, and the photos DON'T feature her breasts? I mean sure, she has them. Many women do!
  - rimliu 6mo ago
    An average human has a bit less than one breast and a bit less than one testicle.
kccqzy 6mo ago
> You can build complex grades in a node-based workflow that goes far beyond the layer-based approach of conventional photo applications As someone who has only used layer-based approaches can someone elucidate on why node-based workflows are more powerful? I still remember the first time I discovered layers in professional photo editing applications and I was blown away by how powerful this was.
- TheRealPomax 6mo ago
  Graph edits vs. linear editing: with layers you just get layers that go on top of each other. You can't separately take the input image, apply two separate changes to it, and then mix those changes back into a single image. And no amount of masking will help: unless your masks never overlap, layers literally can't do what a graph can do. Practical example: I have a bird that's being chased by another bird, and they overlap in the shot. There's weird lighting on the bird that's further away, so I need to grade them differently. But they overlap so now I have a challenge. I could try to do this using layers and masks: mask both birds in a way that the masks don't overlap, while perfectly tweaking the mask feathering so that there's minimal bleed on their overlap, then tie each mask to an adjustment layer. But if I have graph based adjustments available, I first split my input into separate nodes for the background and each bird, then for each of those, I can send them through a node that masks them appropriately without worrying about mask overlap. I can then chain adjustment nodes to grade all three and I can save those grades separately, too so I can use them on other shots from the same series, then I can send each chain into a muxer that turns the three elements back into a single composition. I could do that with layers, where I clone the full image several times, create my adjustments in groups, then render each group to a new layer, hide everything else, and mix those layers, but now what do I do if I want to tweak the grading? Delete my layer, unhide the group, tweak the adjustments, rerender the group, mix the new "final" layer in, and holy crap how many things I did I just need to do that weren't "making my adjustments"? Whereas with a node graph you just make your adjustment. Done, your change simply cascades through the graph. There's a lot that you can do with layers, but layers are just a linear graph: you can do more if you can branch and merge your graph.
- jerf 6mo ago
  In a nutshell, nodes enable arbitrary programming. This is one of the big success stories for visual programming. Nothing would stop you from doing all that in a text programming language but there's definitely an appeal to the graphical layout when you have modules getting input from half-a-dozen different sources and then outputting to just as many.
TheRealPomax 6mo ago
Does it come with DAM, or is there no asset management and if you want to load photos into a project you're still stuck with per-project (power)bins?
miladyincontrol 6mo ago
Wish it supported more raw formats that most libraries (ie libraw) support. Lens corrections are also a big question mark, and if they are using something like lensfun I really do hope they allow user imported db/corrections rather than whatever is compiled into it. Neat that they try to support JXL compressed raws but colors render very off. Seems some promise, while I love davinci for video I'm not sure this will be for me, but I'm excited for those who it is enough for.
btown 6mo ago
Any information about what the $295 Studio license adds for Photos specifically? Having trouble finding a feature matrix. Is scripting from an external system (like Claude Code) easier/only possible with the full Studio version?
jobgh 6mo ago
I'd been trying to migrate from LR to RapidRaw, but it's been tough as most features are just trying to catch up to LR. DaVinci handles a lot of things better than LR from the start. Going to give it a go. Crossing my fingers
cjk 6mo ago
I use Lightroom Classic with the excellent Negative Lab Pro plug-in for converting film negatives, but I can’t stand Lightroom itself. I could easily see using this for post-conversion color grading.
- kleinishere 6mo ago
  Also stuck on Lightroom for this purpose. Have been looking for any analog/film perspectives on this update from Photrio and Reddit but nothing yet. Curious if this could potentially replace Negative Lab Pro (despite generally being quite good) in my workflow and take me out of Lightroom.
sta123 6mo ago
combine this with claude code and make a tool like buttecut.io for photos :D
sherlockx 6mo ago
This is really awesome news.
ano-ther 6mo ago
Neat. But I am still disappointed that their ATEM Mini Extreme does not capture the transitions when recording to disk and opening in DaVinci Resolve (you only get the tracks). In their marketing materials it sounded like you do. Switched back to Premiere after discovering that.
MetroWind 6mo ago
FIIIIIInally someone understands.

1147 points by thebiblelover7 6mo ago

dcliu 6mo ago

DaVinci Resolve has been an incredible value. Hoping this becomes a viable contender vs Capture One and Lightroom.

pier25 6mo ago

Pretty cool. Would be great if you could use it on its own app instead of having to load a Resolve project.

amanzi 6mo ago

Nice. And this should be fully supported on Linux too, I hope.

GrayShade 6mo ago
It only supports CUDA on Linux.

__mharrison__ 6mo ago

Davinci resolve studio is awesome. 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.

dylan604 6mo ago
> It's actually faster than working with an editor. what does this mean? it is an editor
- cuu508 6mo ago
  Faster than to work with a human person who edits your videos.
  - dylan604 6mo ago
    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.
- pinkmuffinere 6mo ago
  Ya, I’m also confused. Maybe they mean it’s faster than handing it off a (professional) human editor?
__mharrison__ 6mo ago
Folks were confused by my comment. I've created courses for most well known technical course providers. Some do all the editing for you. Others make you do the editing. Some do "in between". Where they do some edits but then ask you to validate, etc. That middle group has always been annoying because it has been a huge context shift. By the time I go through their questions, it's typically easier for me to do the full edit myself. No, I'm not editing a feature length movie.

mturilin 6mo ago

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.

InfinityByTen 6mo ago
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. On that note, is this supported on Linux?
- tech234a 6mo ago
  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.
  - hulk-konen 6mo ago
    I think this will be the year of the Linux then. Native photo editor with decent ux was the missing piece.
    - InfinityByTen 6mo ago
      I'm so eager to try this out today after work. I heard a lot of things about Darktable, but then it didn't really feel like the alternative to Lightroom I'd hope for.
  - joseluis 6mo ago
    Even the paid version doesn't include aac support in Linux so you have to transcode the audio from videos recorded from your phone, with ffmpeg for example, prior to opening them with resolve. That's the biggest inconvenience it has for me in Linux. And plugins can't solve that either, because apparently can only add codecs for encoding, not for decoding.

buildbot 6mo ago

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.

internetter 6mo ago

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.

Eingin 6mo ago
Yes fusion is supported too! I've seen some demos of people using it for basic spot removal etc. There is a ton of insane potential there!

LewisVerstappen 6mo ago

[flagged]

acomjean 6mo ago

This looks good. 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.)

raincole 6mo ago

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?

adzm 6mo ago
Premium features in the paid software as well
geerlingguy 6mo ago
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.
- gregsadetsky 6mo ago
  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.
  - modeless 6mo ago
    Interesting! How is the latency of this camera?
    - gregsadetsky 6mo ago

geerlingguy 6mo ago

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.

dylan604 6mo ago
that's funny. before it was a video editor, it was an image color correction suite for RAW.
Gigachad 6mo ago
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.
jillesvangurp 6mo ago
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.

bryanhogan 6mo ago

This is an amazing announcement! I've been looking for a good replacement since the Affinity betrayal. I've been using DaVinci Resolve as my desktop video editor for years, and it's great, can highly recommend it as well.

snowe2010 6mo ago
What affinity betrayal?
- jack1243star 6mo ago
  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.
  - Arn_Thor 6mo ago
    This was news to me. Very sad news indeed. I see now they were bought by Canva. That explains it...

andrew2025 6mo ago

[dead]

mikae1 6mo ago

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.

jez 6mo ago
What is your Linux photo editing software of choice?
- mikae1 6mo ago
  darktable[1] and Spektrafilm[2]. [1] https://darktable.org https://darktable.org [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47761280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47761280
  - 8-prime 6mo ago
    Damn, there really are no original ideas anymore. I have been working on essentially the exact thing that Spektrafilm is doing. I'll check that out to see how I can improve my setup.
MrDrMcCoy 6mo ago
I tried several times to get Resolve to take my DNG sequences for video (as produced by my Sigma fp), but it only brings them in with very broken and washed out lighting. No combination of settings I've tried either imports them correctly or gives me enough leeway to post-correct them into something usable. Lightworks can handle them better, but is a lot less flexible in color correction, and I don't want to deal with their subscription model.

nekiwo 6mo ago

Now we just need a proper replacement for After Effects on Linux and I will stop dualbooting.

4k93n2 6mo ago
is davinci fusion not an after effects alternative? or is it not at the same level?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- whywhywhywhy 6mo ago
  There’s crossover in that they both do compositing but AE uniquely has a lot of other things from the motion graphics side that just doesn’t exist anywhere else.
  - teovall 6mo ago
    Does the integration of Krokodove into Resolve 21 close that gap at all?
- alfirous 6mo ago
  In my experience, it's not easy as After Effects. Though for simple VFX, motion or animation is doable. For me best alternative to AE is Blender.
  - falkensmaize 6mo ago
    Yeah this is the way. Blender has a higher learning curve than AE but it’s ultimately much better at actual 3d than AE is, and the recent improvements to the interface have made it a lot more usable.
ch_fr 6mo ago
Fusion has great potential, but is probably being held back by a lack of community support, the slightly-higher-barrier-of-entry of node-based workflows, and the subtle but annoying ways in which the software can work against you. TLDR: it does some stuff slower than ae, but nodes allows it to very easily do a lot of stuff that ae struggles with. It's also a lot easier to parse since node->properties is less nested than comp->layers->effects->properties (and this makes a big difference on cognitive load).

arecsu 6mo ago

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.

esperent 6mo ago
> 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.
- Maxion 6mo ago
  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.
  - FireBeyond 6mo ago

LandenLove 6mo ago

Please release me from Adobe Lightroom.

axelriet 6mo ago
One thing that LR does well is leverage Adobe Camera Raw and its great support for many raw formats.
- LandenLove 6mo ago
  I like how Lightroom simplifies a lot of the editing process. Alternatives like Rawtherpee are very intimidating. I also like the cloud backup and sync that Lightroom has. But I swear it gets slower and slower with every update.
- 9x39 6mo ago
  And adding newly released lens correction profiles. It's nice to have a lot of things just work.
Mario9382 6mo ago
My annual Adobe subscription expires in 15 days and I'm here gathering all possible alternatives. This is my last year giving them money after all dark patterns they use so you pay / don't leave.
eeiaeaa 6mo ago
Hobby photographer here, so take that into account. My workflow is very simple. I moved from Windows and Adobe LightRoom to Fedora Linux with KDE Plasma, using DigiKam for downloading and organizing photos, and RawTherapee for RAW editing. I use GIMP here and there for occasional touch-ups. It's not as smooth as LightRoom and there is a learning curve, but you are gaining independence.

robertwt7 6mo ago

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!

Pyrodogg 6mo ago
> 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.
- Maxion 6mo ago
  > ...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.
- atombender 6mo ago
  As a long-term Lightroom user (who's never used DaVinci Resolve before), to me this doesn't look like it's positioned to compete with LR as a primary photo library/editor tool. If that is their goal, then I think it's a huge failure. What they've done is add photo support to Resolve, which is still primarily a video tool. All the video stuff is there — most parts of the UI is oriented around video clips and video editing. The photo editing is kind of buried in there. Compared to Lightroom, this doesn't seem like it's designed to be a real library management tool, let alone a DAM. Lightroom has very good support for previews, decoupling the library metadata from the physical media, and so on.

brontosaurusrex 6mo ago

Ok, I will have to take my time to figure out why the valid license is not starting my resolve on offline machine now.

ilsubyeega 6mo ago

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

d3Xt3r 6mo ago
Maybe there's a way to get it working with ZLUDA?

VerifiedReports 6mo ago

Looks more useful than the Cut page. 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.

armandososa 6mo ago
Amigo! If you're not a professional video editor but you have to, occasionally, make long videos shorter or just remove awkward silences, etc., the cut page is a godsend. You grab the knife tool, bim, bam, boom, you're done.
- VerifiedReports 6mo ago
  You can do that on the Edit page.
  - rimliu 6mo ago
    and you kinda can eat soup with a knife.
    - VerifiedReports 6mo ago
      likewise more effective than the Cut page.

mmaunder 6mo ago

BM stills camera coming soon. It would replicate their video model with their software driving their hardware sales.

qsi 6mo ago

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?

teovall 6mo ago
Yes, it works with JPEG, HEIF, PNG, TIFF, AF, PSD, and several other still image formats.

Jamesbeam 6mo ago

I really like what BMD is doing. Disappointed with all the companies starting with A. Having a proper choice that is not Adobe or Affinity is a win for every amateur like myself working with videos and photos.

Forgeties79 6mo ago
I switched my department over to resolve studio about 2 years ago and we’ve never regretted it. We use the NLE and fusion components constantly. Fairlight is a bit meh still but otherwise we’re very happy. Premiere was such a pain

divan 6mo ago

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.

divan 6mo ago
While we're on topic, I've been using DaVinci with this camera for a slightly unusual hybrid process. With a good light and lens I shoot slow-mo video (240fps FullHD or 120fps 4K) with shutter speed of 1/1000. Then I can take any frame and save it as a photo directly from Davinci. I wrote 2 scripts for that: - first is for keyboard shortcut that automates "Switch to color tab, Grab a still, Save a still to folder, Switch back" - second for more advanced workflow where I put markers on the frames I like, and then it uses Fusion's Saver node to save images as EXR This flow is even faster than culling with Photo Mechanic. In both cases I get 10bit PNG or EXR images that I can import into the photo editor. Workflow is far from the perfect yet, as it might need some adjustment when working with Log profile or different FPS (for 2nd script). But aside of giving me an option of "shooting" video+photos at the same time, it blows my mind that it's practically "shoot photos 240 times per second and choose later", and how good the end result is. The bitrate of video is 280Mbps (4:2:2, 10bit) and while video compression quality is not negligible, the resulting "still photos"'s quality is more than enough for social media purpose. Photo example [1] [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/13So6ZuVx3dn2jZCw7cm3LkbzydF3d_uA/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/13So6ZuVx3dn2jZCw7cm3LkbzydF...
tecleandor 6mo ago
What are you doing with Photomechanic since the price raise, change to subscriptions, and deprecation of the Plus version? Are you using an old version or have you moved to the subscriptions?

cetinsert 6mo ago

The word Hollywood has such a strong negative charge at this point that I cannot believe they stick to using it in marketing like that.

amatecha 6mo ago

It took me a damn long time to find this information, so I'm pasting it here: > It includes native RAW support for Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, Sony and even iPhone ProRAW. I looked all over for a more technical page that just lists these kind of specs in bullet-point form, but apparently they refuse to communicate information about their product in this way? The "Tech Specs" page only seems to show information about hardware products. /shrug Would be cool to have something I can use to edit my Fujifilm-shot photos without any sort of subscription. Capture One Express (or whatever it's called now) is super light on features, but processes Fujifilm .RAF's very well (oh, or it used to, apparently it's permanently discontinued now, great). I'd love to use Lightroom but I refuse to pay for a subscription to use software, so... options are limited :\

IndrekR 6mo ago
Have you tried Affinity Photo?
- petepete 6mo ago
  Affinity is great for editing but doesn't do the library management stuff that Capture One/Lightroom etc do.
- amatecha 6mo ago
  I haven't, but based on the history summarized in this post[0] I'm guessing they will soon force everyone into their subscriptions anyways [0] https://mg0x7be.github.io/affinity-enshittification-how-canvas-four-pledges-aged-like-milk.html https://mg0x7be.github.io/affinity-enshittification-how-canv...
jjbinx007 6mo ago
I have a Lumix camera which doesn't have support for Raw files but apparently you can just use the free Adobe DNG converter and it works well. It should work for your Fuji Raws too.
- sanitycheck 6mo ago

jdboyd 6mo ago

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has loading images into Resolve before for this very purpose, so I'm interested in trying this at some point. There is a bunch of other stuff I think is interesting in this release's marketting as well. For instance. OGraf, a new EBU standard for HTML in motion graphics systems, as well as Lottie animation support. The AI blemish remover looks interesting. The AI content search looks interesting. AI Slate ID looks interesting, although I've never actually used a slate. I'm less thrilled to see an AI speech generator though. There is now Vertical Resolution support. Not something I have particularly wanted to do, but I can see it being useful to a lot of people. Also, the new Picture in Picture tool looks like it might be a time saver, as someone who does a lot of people talking next to slides.

dfordp11 6mo ago

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jzer0cool 6mo ago

I missed if the collaboration portion can be self-hosted, or is it available via some API access. Anyone know?

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

wg0 6mo ago

Just curious - what UI library they use for their user interfaces?

JoshStrobl 6mo ago
As far as I know, it's their own in-house solution (not fltk, gtk, qt, etc.)

curioussquirrel 6mo ago

Thanks for sharing! Have been begrudgingly using Darktable since that seems to be your best option on Linux, but the UI/UX never really clicked with me. I wish this was opensource but I will give this a shot (pun intended) for sure.

HelloUsername 6mo ago

Is there a way to only download the Photo editor software part? It seems its immediately bundled with all other video and audio tools and effects

sudonem 6mo ago
No. It’s a component of Davinci Resolve, not an isolated binary. It’s not likely ever to be offered as a standalone app. That’s just not how Resolve is designed.

yieldcrv 6mo ago

I currently use photopea.com for a Photoshop interface to do cosmetic edits and logos Could check this out Might be the final nail in the coffin for my creative cloud subscription

northernsausage 6mo ago

I honestly hope there is a whole suite of middle and upper management at Adobe sweating right now. I'll wait for the reviews but this looks like a total win for me as 90% stills and already using resolve for the other 10% and having had 10 years of Adobe bleeding me dry whilst basically not developing Lightroom (the only tool I need) I am looking to jump, no LEAP from their subscription service.

googie 6mo ago

I wish they (authors of DaVinci Resolve and the Photo Editor) paid more attention to Linux platform. Theoretically DaVinci Resolve runs on Linux, but getting it run is a very bad experience on Ubuntu/Kubuntu 24.04. I even paid for the DaVinci license, as I read somewhere that for Linux it's necessary in order to have all codecs supported. It did not help. Fortunately there were no problems with refund. There are whole guides online how to walk around these issues and even then I could not get the audio working. Somehow it relies on some old ALSA API, which is no longer maintained/supported on Ubuntu/Kubuntu, or I'm just too stupid to make it work. AI assistants could not provide working solution for me either. I've moved back to Linux a year ago after around 10 years of Windows (and I used to use Linux Slackware for ~15 years beforehand). I am amazed how big progress the KDE made and whole Linux ecosystem. Gaming these days is just as easy as on Windows, which was my primary reason to switch to Windows. My printer just works now. Even music production is excellent on Linux now. There is plenty of great software options to choose from and they just work - as I would expect from the mature ecosystem. This all feels so good, given how Linux is not pushing trash into my computer (OS-bound spyware/bloatware), has excellent, customizable UI. Full freedom. I do feel that I own my hardware. Yet I miss DaVinci Resolve. For now I use Kdenlive, which is nice for simple editing, but feels unfinished, or I just don't know how to use it correctly.

anal_reactor 6mo ago
Exactly my thought. On Windows I used the free version for casual video editing and making memes. On Linux it just doesn't work. I managed to somehow fix the audio problem, then it had issues with codecs, and in general it was very miserable experience.
roygdavis 6mo ago
I got it working with the help of Gemini, here's my chat if you want to try again <https://gemini.google.com/share/50fa089e2f2c https://gemini.google.com/share/50fa089e2f2c>
- googie 6mo ago
  Thanks, but as far as I read it, it's all about the library file names mismatch, which is mostly covered by guides I mentioned earlier. I've done that and I got my DaVinci running. It was just audio output that did not work, despite hours spent on trying to get it work.

te_chris 6mo ago

I only pay adobe because, as an amateur, I can dump in raw files and they then make them go away from my hd. It's wild that no one else offers this, but that seems to be where we are. How does BM cloud work in this regard? Can we dump a card straight in, have it sync, edit, export etc and never think about the files again?

agos 6mo ago

if the camera profiles are good (or they support third party profiling) this could easily become my go to, but that's a big if

danbruc 6mo ago

Complete tangent, what is going on with this image [1]? Render? AI? Too much post-processing? It has some computer game graphics look to me, but I can not quite put the finger on what seems off. [1] https://images.blackmagicdesign.com/images/products/davinciresolve/photo/hardware/hardware-md.jpg?_v=1775692984 https://images.blackmagicdesign.com/images/products/davincir...

miksuko 6mo ago
Ridiculously engineered studio lighting and HDR, I would suppose. Stuff can start looking very artificial when you start bringing in good equipment.
- goldenarm 6mo ago
  We may be witnessing a fascinating trend : AI images are making professional-grade imagery look like spam, and natural lighting and blurry images are becoming the new "human" esthetic.
  - yieldcrv 6mo ago
    the last two generations (9 months) of image models do natural lighting and blurry images really well too
o10449366 6mo ago
Softbox lighting and it looks off because obviously no one lights their work desk like they would for a professional photo shoot.
dan-robertson 6mo ago
I’m not sure if it’s AI so much as a composition of dozens of images stacked on top of each other. The shadows of different objects seem to be going in different directions.
Kkoala 6mo ago
Looks like a rendered scene yes

v1ne 6mo ago

Great! Brings a bit more dynamic into the market. So far, I'm happy with DxO, but I also don't need to manage a library. I don't know, does Resolve have lens corrections for 100+ lenses built-in? That's the thing that DxO does really well: Lens corrections, matching your camera's color rendering, denoising. Unfortunately, they still struggle with HDR output. I imagine the tools in Resolve save you much time, due to automation. Probably handy if you shoot a lot. Yet, the biggest difference is that in photography, you're not necessarily limited by throughput. You can and do actually put a lot of effort into single images.

alfanick 6mo ago

This is big, it works on Linux. Finally! Let me check it out Edit: ofc it couldn't be that easy, need to update some libs to make DaVinci Resolve happy.

SomeHacker44 6mo ago
What Linux distro did you use? Any pointers? Thanks!
- alfanick 6mo ago
  I'm using Linux Mint 22.3 so Ubuntu 24.04... Haven't solved the problem yet - either going to install/build needed libs and use LD_* vars to point to correct libs, or pack this in Docker/Podman container (but X11 apps and docker are quite a challenge too).

unit149 6mo ago

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talkfold 6mo ago

Blackmagic's move: ship a Lightroom competitor inside software photographers already pirate for video editing. Distribution solved.

yonatan8070 6mo ago
Who's pirating Resolve? Doesn't it have a generous free version?
- 8-prime 6mo ago
  It's generous but limited in some aspects. True 4k resolution is not supported (or at least wasn't the last time I checked). It also didn't support H.265 4:2:2 files. I guess once you reach the level where you need to work on these types of files, it would be warranted to pay the very reasonable price for Resolve.
- sudonem 6mo ago
  Yes. The free version is very generous. Most non-professionals won’t ever need a license for Resolve Studio. BMD’s entire game here is that they are a hardware company first. They hook you in with some really good software - and when you start getting in to professional workflows that requires specialized hardware (I.e. capture cards, I/O devices etc) you’re locked in to needing to use BMD hardware. So it doesn’t cost them a great deal to offer the free version to most people because they have to have the software anyway to support the hardware. Also, while they certainly make a profit on the studio licenses, it seems to be largely because offering those advanced features have costs they can’t eat. For example, the official (and expensive) Apple ProRes encoder SDKs, and advanced tech behind their noise reduction plugins among others.

jayphen 6mo ago

I actually downloaded this and tried it. Am I the first one here to do that? As someone who hasn't touched DaVinci products before (but a lot of experience with LR) - I am immediately confused by the integration of photo editing here. It feels very much like video editing software with photo editing tacked on. I can imagine that this would be much more intuitive for people who are already used to using DaVinci for video editing. I can intuit from the interface that there are a lot of powerful editing opportunities here, but I feel lost in the software. I spent 15 minutes or so trying to figure out how to do simple masking, but I could not find any way to do it for photos. Obviously this is just a beta and hopefully the workflow will be improved, but unless the photo editing features are extracted in to their own software package, I don't think it's enough yet to sway me from LR (and I want so desperately to be swayed)

_joel 6mo ago
Isn't this aimed at people already using Resolve for video work who want to do still images too?
- jayphen 6mo ago
  It is unclear. Their marketing material at least does imply that they are targeting photographers: > Whether you’re a professional colorist looking to apply your skills to fashion shoots and weddings, or a photographer who wants to work beyond the limits of traditional photo applications, the Photo page unlocks the tools you need
scotty79 6mo ago
> It feels very much like video editing software with photo editing tacked on. Isn't it exactly what it is?
- jayphen 6mo ago
  Yes, but I think it's important to make that clear. It doesn't appear to attempt to target photographers who are not coming from a video editing background, and photographers will probably be disappointed. I do hope they split this out to a separate focused product, as the photo editing space is in dire need of more options.

headsnap_io 6mo ago

amazing how people still hire photographers in this day and age.

manoDev 6mo ago
People who live in the real world, not in a basement living a fake metaverse life.
Wistar 6mo ago
The ones that do likely first tried to do the photography themselves.

major505 6mo ago

Well, anything that takes market from Adobe and their shit licensing is good news.

lynndotpy 6mo ago

This is uncanny. Just yesterday, I was complaining about the state of photo editing software (Adobe and Google are no-gos, and Darkroom provided a thousand thorns). I wished that DaVinci had a photo editor, because I had similar pains about video editing that were resolved when I learned about DaVinci. AND it runs on Linux! It's not every night you make a wish and wake up to find out it has come true.

finnjohnsen2 6mo ago
The simulation says you're welcome. Haha, just kidding. This is not a simulation obviously.

thomasfl 6mo ago

Great news. One more piece of software that makes the world less reliable on A*be's expensive subscription fee based software.

T3RMINATED 6mo ago

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Forgeties79 6mo ago

Lightroom killer hopefully. I started on FCP, did FCPX, did premiere for 2 years (awful), now my production team is completely around resolve studio. I would never go back to any of the others, Resolve is clearly the superior NLE with a company that has thus far maintained pretty stellar business practices IME. I’m rooting for black magic design on this one. Adobe is a terrible company.

Archit3ch 6mo ago

As someone who doesn't edit photos: 1) How does this compare to Affinity Photo? 2) Is there an iPad version?

botanrice 6mo ago

Been spending hours over the past few months prepping to get rid of Adobe because I just cannot justify the monthly subscription cost for each new release to get slower and more bloated, pushed through with AI. Photoshop has needed a real competitor for a long time. Only thing keeping me atm is having learned Premiere Pro's workflow quite well by now. Time to change.

superxpro12 6mo ago

This is cool, but I can't help but notice the first 50% of the page has breasts featured in every photo.... Like, comeon lol. be a little less transparent about it.

contrast 6mo ago
That's your reaction to a page about photography that has photos of a model, and the photos DON'T feature her breasts? I mean sure, she has them. Many women do!
- rimliu 6mo ago
  An average human has a bit less than one breast and a bit less than one testicle.

kccqzy 6mo ago

> You can build complex grades in a node-based workflow that goes far beyond the layer-based approach of conventional photo applications As someone who has only used layer-based approaches can someone elucidate on why node-based workflows are more powerful? I still remember the first time I discovered layers in professional photo editing applications and I was blown away by how powerful this was.

TheRealPomax 6mo ago
Graph edits vs. linear editing: with layers you just get layers that go on top of each other. You can't separately take the input image, apply two separate changes to it, and then mix those changes back into a single image. And no amount of masking will help: unless your masks never overlap, layers literally can't do what a graph can do. Practical example: I have a bird that's being chased by another bird, and they overlap in the shot. There's weird lighting on the bird that's further away, so I need to grade them differently. But they overlap so now I have a challenge. I could try to do this using layers and masks: mask both birds in a way that the masks don't overlap, while perfectly tweaking the mask feathering so that there's minimal bleed on their overlap, then tie each mask to an adjustment layer. But if I have graph based adjustments available, I first split my input into separate nodes for the background and each bird, then for each of those, I can send them through a node that masks them appropriately without worrying about mask overlap. I can then chain adjustment nodes to grade all three and I can save those grades separately, too so I can use them on other shots from the same series, then I can send each chain into a muxer that turns the three elements back into a single composition. I could do that with layers, where I clone the full image several times, create my adjustments in groups, then render each group to a new layer, hide everything else, and mix those layers, but now what do I do if I want to tweak the grading? Delete my layer, unhide the group, tweak the adjustments, rerender the group, mix the new "final" layer in, and holy crap how many things I did I just need to do that weren't "making my adjustments"? Whereas with a node graph you just make your adjustment. Done, your change simply cascades through the graph. There's a lot that you can do with layers, but layers are just a linear graph: you can do more if you can branch and merge your graph.
jerf 6mo ago
In a nutshell, nodes enable arbitrary programming. This is one of the big success stories for visual programming. Nothing would stop you from doing all that in a text programming language but there's definitely an appeal to the graphical layout when you have modules getting input from half-a-dozen different sources and then outputting to just as many.

TheRealPomax 6mo ago

Does it come with DAM, or is there no asset management and if you want to load photos into a project you're still stuck with per-project (power)bins?

miladyincontrol 6mo ago

Wish it supported more raw formats that most libraries (ie libraw) support. Lens corrections are also a big question mark, and if they are using something like lensfun I really do hope they allow user imported db/corrections rather than whatever is compiled into it. Neat that they try to support JXL compressed raws but colors render very off. Seems some promise, while I love davinci for video I'm not sure this will be for me, but I'm excited for those who it is enough for.

btown 6mo ago

Any information about what the $295 Studio license adds for Photos specifically? Having trouble finding a feature matrix. Is scripting from an external system (like Claude Code) easier/only possible with the full Studio version?

jobgh 6mo ago

I'd been trying to migrate from LR to RapidRaw, but it's been tough as most features are just trying to catch up to LR. DaVinci handles a lot of things better than LR from the start. Going to give it a go. Crossing my fingers

cjk 6mo ago

I use Lightroom Classic with the excellent Negative Lab Pro plug-in for converting film negatives, but I can’t stand Lightroom itself. I could easily see using this for post-conversion color grading.

kleinishere 6mo ago
Also stuck on Lightroom for this purpose. Have been looking for any analog/film perspectives on this update from Photrio and Reddit but nothing yet. Curious if this could potentially replace Negative Lab Pro (despite generally being quite good) in my workflow and take me out of Lightroom.

sta123 6mo ago

combine this with claude code and make a tool like buttecut.io for photos :D

sherlockx 6mo ago

This is really awesome news.

ano-ther 6mo ago

Neat. But I am still disappointed that their ATEM Mini Extreme does not capture the transitions when recording to disk and opening in DaVinci Resolve (you only get the tracks). In their marketing materials it sounded like you do. Switched back to Premiere after discovering that.

MetroWind 6mo ago

FIIIIIInally someone understands.