6 ms·

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 pho

by 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
    PM's performance on Mac has gone through the floor, to me. It shouldn't take 8 seconds to quit on a M2 Ultra. Raw rendering is slow too. I ended up moving to FastRawViewer.
    - pontussw 6mo ago
      I did the same journey, felt quite tragic after so many years in PM but FastRawViewer has been brilliant for me - highly recommend
- omnimus 6mo ago
  There is even Darktable fork Ansel where they try to roll back lot of these ux mishaps. Once you care only about editing and not cataloging then RawTherapee ends up being better editor for mr.
  - mikae1 6mo ago
    > There is even Darktable fork Ansel where they try to roll back lot of these ux mishaps. AFAIK, the reasons Ansel exists are: 1. To yank out darktable internals for code purity reasons. 2. Its (talented) developer worked better by himself than in group. He was vehemently opposed to any idea containing the words "intuitive" or "UX".
    - omnimus 6mo ago
      You are right. I don't know really. I thought that because i find Ansel a bit easier to operate.
- tomaskafka 6mo ago
  The Blender metaphor is spot on. I am a software engineer, I spent 2 years living in 3ds max in my teens, writing tutorials for it, and I am unable to make a basic scene in Blender, it’s like alien made software.
  - unmole 6mo ago
    The GP refered to "blender of yore". Blender went through major UI overhauls and recent versions are very intuitive.
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      Still, Blender and 3ds Max are pretty much on two different ends of some spectrum, not sure which yet, but they seems to more or less follow two very different axioms when it comes to UI and UX philosophy. I've spent most of my 3D-ing time in 3ds Max, but Blender is more intuitive to me, but I also know others in the same position favoring 3ds Max.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      Something can be intuitive to new users and yet a complete mystery to a pro experienced with a different UI paradigm.
  - CyberDildonics 6mo ago
    It really is bizarre. It's like a dive bar that has the bathroom doors as men's on one door with an arrow pointing right and women's on the right with an arrow pointing left. It's a case study in how not to design a UI.
vasco 6mo ago
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.
- buildbot 6mo ago
  An instagram filter is to a 3D lut as a PB&J sandwich is to a Michelin star meal... Let alone the other things listed.
  - vasco 6mo ago
    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.
    - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
      Is there even a working definition of what a "filter" is in Instagram, or mobile photo editors targetting social media users (which is approximately all of the mobile photo editors), beyond "a script that fucks up your photo in some trivial but also undocumented ways"? I'm yet to see a filter that makes your photo look like taken from a specific camera (old or otherwise). Smearing colors and sticking a frame that imitates camera film border does not count.
      - vasco 6mo ago
        Read this https://www.christopherroosen.com/blog/2019/11/10/how-imperfect-analog-lomo-photography-inspired-and-then-was-pushed-from-instagram https://www.christopherroosen.com/blog/2019/11/10/how-imperf... I cant find the original source of why I know this but I know the original Instagram filters were trying to emulate specific looks from specific analog cameras and expired film. Smearing colors for example or weird blue / purple overlays is what you get when you shoot expired film.
porphyra 6mo ago
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.
- patrakov 6mo ago
  To give DarkTable credit, neural-network-based denoising will be in the next major release (5.6). And even without neural networks, DarkTable denoising is better than open-source competitors, due to the database of camera sensor noise shipped with it. For each supported camera and ISO setting, it contains the measured values of Poissonian and Gaussian components of the sensor noise, so proper denoising becomes a one-click operation. That's as opposed to the much more complicated "drag the luminance and chrominance noise sliders until the noise disappears, then drag two more sliders to recover detail" workflow found, e.g., in ART.
- trop 6mo ago
  Darktable has a "neural restore" algorithm [0] in the development version (intended for midsummer release). Note: - It appears to be an out-of-band pre-processing stage (run the image through denoise to produce an intermediary TIFF), unlike most other parts of the program. - All AI features are gated behind compile-time flags which default to off. [0] https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/20523 https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/20523
  - porphyra 6mo ago
    Wow, that's great news!
- sergimansilla 6mo ago
  As a Capture One user, I wish Capture One had NN denoising. It is one area in which it can’t touch Lightroom.
t0bia_s 6mo ago
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.
- orbital-decay 6mo ago
  Photoshop itself, without ACR, is light years behind in color processing. It's a dinosaur at this point. It had only one remotely competent grading plugin (Firegrade), but it seems abandoned.
  - t0bia_s 6mo ago
    Name some color process that cannot be done in PS. I'm recommending PS for color grading to be precise.
    - orbital-decay 6mo ago
      You can do anything in a hex editor. The question is how convenient it is.
      - t0bia_s 6mo ago
        Beside Adobe terms of use and implemented spyware, their software is convenient enough to justify monopoly on market. Sure, editing via prompts or personalised automated actions would be ultimate convenience, but we are not here yet. Day by day software like those from Adobe or BlackMagic will be obsolete.
    - t0bia_s 6mo ago
      *not
gyomu 6mo ago
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.
- mastermage 6mo ago
  Counterpoint most of the Movies budgets is usualy spent on the actors and on the filming. Not on the editing team. There is also copious amounts of money in photography Alot of advertising is still static images and print.
  - atoav 6mo ago
    Yes, but if the budget of the whole thing is high(er) they don't tend to cheap out on details that could mske or break it. Or phrased differently: If your shoot codts a million a day it doesn't matter if your camera costs 400 bucks a day or 40. In fact they may ask you whether you really wanna go with the 40-buck camera.
    - mastermage 6mo ago
      > Yes, but if the budget of the whole thing is high(er) they don't tend to cheap out on details that could mske or break it. The evidence does not point to this. There have been copious amounts of movies that hired the Rock and then made the worst CGI in the history of Cinema.
- d3vnull 6mo ago
  But there's a couple orders of magnitude more photo shoots than movies and since once you write software once, you can copy it for free, investing in creating photo editing software still makes sense.
jiggawatts 6mo ago
> handles so damn well when it comes to color editing I know it sounds shocking to criticise the color editing capabilities of a dedicated colorist tool, but... Resolve only got HDR output support on Windows recently! Up to version 18 or 19 it output gibberish that only specialised (super expensive) monitors could display. So you could have a HDR OLED 4K monitor and you'd get a washed out mess unless you also spent a ton of money on SDI cards for no good reason. Sure, they fixed that now, but the pedigree of "we're a hardware company first, software company second" remains. They're not a photo editing company and have no idea what makes Lightroom "the" industry standard. > conservative culture (photography) vs progressive (video editing) I've found the exact opposite to be true! Lightroom has used "scene referred" (correct) color management since forever. 32-bit float ultra-wide-gamut HDR throughout. This is a "new" feature in Resolve! [1] Similarly, I just tried Resolve 21 photo export and it exports... SDR. Probably in sRGB, who knows? Appears to be totally uncalibrated. Meanwhile Lightroom can export 16-bit PNGs, wide-gamut, true HDR, HDR gain maps, JPEG XL, etc, etc. Resolve is way behind on the basics. [1] There are excuses for this, mostly to do with performance when editing real-time footage vs a still image.
- user34283 6mo ago
  I tried Resolve just now for Photos, and I'm not impressed. The Sony RAW file rendered terrible compared to Lightroom. I found the interface unintuitive and did not even manage to locate the much praised Color grading features. That tab opens with a Video view. This needs some work to compete with Lightroom for Photos - I see that it's Beta 1, just saying.
  - jiggawatts 6mo ago
    I guarantee that it won't improve significantly even after several major releases. Resolve is designed to be controlled with their "panels", which have lots of dials and knobs to turn. The software only interface is clunky at best, and they steadfastly refuse to fix basic usability issues lest that undermine the justification for buying their hardware. For example, cropping and rotating media in Lightroom is a totally different experience compared to Resolve (photo or video, they're both bad!). Lightroom lets you fine-adjust sliders by pressing shift so that instead of rotating an image by HUGE AMOUNTS BACK AND FORTH you can easily remove a 0.4% tilt without having to type in the numbers into an "angle" text input box like a savage. Lightroom's crop and rotate controls do a "constrained crop" by default so that you don't get black wedges in the corners of the image. When the background is already mostly (but not perfectly) black, this can be infuriating to fix in Resolve by alternatively rotating, cropping (numerically!), rotating, cropping etc... While I'm complaining about Resolve issues, it gets the color temperature scale wrong, as per this video, to the point where I find it nearly unusable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WADuXiMZxq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WADuXiMZxq4
orbital-decay 6mo ago
This was always absolutely inexplicable to me. A lot of photographers are just resistant to better color tools (as in, actively arguing against them!) or are in deep denial about their existence. Photography is well behind videography in that regard.
- discopicante 6mo ago
  I think this has been imprinted in the photographer world due to long-standing requirements from AP, Reuters, etc. on avoiding post-processing. Video has never had these constraints; post-processing is required to publish the works.
  - tablatom 6mo ago
    That’s interesting - how do they define that? Surely they don’t publish raw rgb?
    - discopicante 6mo ago
      Reuters banned photos processed from RAW over 10y ago. They will only accept JPEGs from the camera. https://signalprocessingsociety.org/community-involvement/information-forensics-and-security/newsletter/reuters-issues-worldwide-ban-raw https://signalprocessingsociety.org/community-involvement/in... AP has had these rules since the late 90s: "Only the established norms of standard photo printing methods such as burning, dodging, black-and-white toning and cropping are acceptable. Retouching is limited to removal of normal scratches and dust spots." https://niemanreports.org/aps-policy-banning-photo-manipulation/ https://niemanreports.org/aps-policy-banning-photo-manipulat...
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      As mentioned it's impossible to get "unretouched digital photos" because the camera itself does post-processing - but there were some spicy scandals that arguably were somewhere in the gray area between "move a damn pyramid" and "applying normal lighting techniques" that they resolved with "just use JPEG from the camera". Of course, we now know that "JPEG from the camera" can be complete bollocks, so it's going to get worse. https://www.bronxdoc.org/bronx-documentary-center/exhibits/altered-images/gordon-gahan/ https://www.bronxdoc.org/bronx-documentary-center/exhibits/a... https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...
northernsausage 6mo ago
As a professional photographer and mostly stills editor I am really excited to get to learn more advanced colour editing using this software, already using it for some video at a novice level. Thankfully I don't get much video work to do but learning the skills on stills is going to really improve my skills in motion. - I'll wait for the reviews but really looking forward to cancelling my adobe sub.
CyberDildonics 6mo ago
Ironically it works very well to edit a photo in a compositing program which black magic also gives away for free in digital fusion. People just don't know about it or how to use it.
- Melatonic 6mo ago
  Interesting - how new is their compositing software ?
  - CyberDildonics 6mo ago
    It is many decades old but it was bought by black magic.
harrall 6mo ago
I disagree — photography has always been ripe with significant digital alteration of photos. The main issue is that Adobe has been a long time player in the market and they have historically segmented into 4 distinct types of tools: RAW editing (Lightroom), raster editing (Photoshop), vector (Illustrator), and video editing (Premiere). Adobe still dominates in the first 3 categories. Achieving the effects you listed would just happen in Photoshop, and Adobe never cross contaminates their product lines with the same features. You’d need to buy both Lightroom ($12/mo) and Photoshop to do what you want ($20/mo). Want vector editing? $40/mo now. Creative subscriptions are good money to them. You’ll see other companies try to break this segmentation — for example, Affinity combined several categories of tools into one, but when they first released their suite, they actually followed Adobe’s model.
- Melatonic 6mo ago
  Photoshop has camera raw which is literally what Lightroom is built on - it's basically just a reskin of ACR with cataloguing and other features. After Effects is also huge
alfanick 6mo ago
While Darktable has a lot of nice niche features, from UX point of view it’s 20 years behind any of commercial offerings. If GIMP is like open source Photoshop, then Darktable is like open source Lightroom - both GIMP and Darktable are absolutely crap when it comes to UX, unless you mastered them for 10 years. Darktable should focus on some UX/UI GSOC-like project and figure out their usability to be considered useful.
- afarviral 6mo ago
  I'm some ways I'd argue the UI of darktable is ahead of its time and fairly snazzy. It's just a much more sophisticated tool. What is one thing about the UI that specifically feels dated? Burried maybe, but dated?
animanoir 6mo ago
[dead]
connorelsea 6mo ago
I've been really pleased with Luminar Neo for photo editing and have been using it alongside Lightroom. Their marketing unfortunately makes it seem like an unserious and gimmicky tool for non-professionals, just due to extreme AI focus and SaaS-ificiation of their website, but it's actually really good software. The core editing tools are on par with Lightroom and have very friendly UX, and some (not all) of the near-gimmick AI features are actually impressive and forward-thinking.
- qingcharles 6mo ago
  I also use Neo set up as a plugin to Photoshop. This has been my pro setup for like 3 years now. I couldn't do without Neo, it makes some tasks so much quicker than any of the other options.
laughing_me 6mo ago
Because their roles differ, their perspectives differ as well. Photographers create value through photography, while post-production professionals create value by giving the work a new perspective.

by arecsu 6mo ago

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
  PM's performance on Mac has gone through the floor, to me. It shouldn't take 8 seconds to quit on a M2 Ultra. Raw rendering is slow too. I ended up moving to FastRawViewer.
  - pontussw 6mo ago
    I did the same journey, felt quite tragic after so many years in PM but FastRawViewer has been brilliant for me - highly recommend
omnimus 6mo ago
There is even Darktable fork Ansel where they try to roll back lot of these ux mishaps. Once you care only about editing and not cataloging then RawTherapee ends up being better editor for mr.
- mikae1 6mo ago
  > There is even Darktable fork Ansel where they try to roll back lot of these ux mishaps. AFAIK, the reasons Ansel exists are: 1. To yank out darktable internals for code purity reasons. 2. Its (talented) developer worked better by himself than in group. He was vehemently opposed to any idea containing the words "intuitive" or "UX".
  - omnimus 6mo ago
    You are right. I don't know really. I thought that because i find Ansel a bit easier to operate.
tomaskafka 6mo ago
The Blender metaphor is spot on. I am a software engineer, I spent 2 years living in 3ds max in my teens, writing tutorials for it, and I am unable to make a basic scene in Blender, it’s like alien made software.
- unmole 6mo ago
  The GP refered to "blender of yore". Blender went through major UI overhauls and recent versions are very intuitive.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    Still, Blender and 3ds Max are pretty much on two different ends of some spectrum, not sure which yet, but they seems to more or less follow two very different axioms when it comes to UI and UX philosophy. I've spent most of my 3D-ing time in 3ds Max, but Blender is more intuitive to me, but I also know others in the same position favoring 3ds Max.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    Something can be intuitive to new users and yet a complete mystery to a pro experienced with a different UI paradigm.
- CyberDildonics 6mo ago
  It really is bizarre. It's like a dive bar that has the bathroom doors as men's on one door with an arrow pointing right and women's on the right with an arrow pointing left. It's a case study in how not to design a UI.

vasco 6mo ago

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.

buildbot 6mo ago
An instagram filter is to a 3D lut as a PB&J sandwich is to a Michelin star meal... Let alone the other things listed.
- vasco 6mo ago
  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.
  - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
    Is there even a working definition of what a "filter" is in Instagram, or mobile photo editors targetting social media users (which is approximately all of the mobile photo editors), beyond "a script that fucks up your photo in some trivial but also undocumented ways"? I'm yet to see a filter that makes your photo look like taken from a specific camera (old or otherwise). Smearing colors and sticking a frame that imitates camera film border does not count.
    - vasco 6mo ago
      Read this https://www.christopherroosen.com/blog/2019/11/10/how-imperfect-analog-lomo-photography-inspired-and-then-was-pushed-from-instagram https://www.christopherroosen.com/blog/2019/11/10/how-imperf... I cant find the original source of why I know this but I know the original Instagram filters were trying to emulate specific looks from specific analog cameras and expired film. Smearing colors for example or weird blue / purple overlays is what you get when you shoot expired film.

porphyra 6mo ago

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.

patrakov 6mo ago
To give DarkTable credit, neural-network-based denoising will be in the next major release (5.6). And even without neural networks, DarkTable denoising is better than open-source competitors, due to the database of camera sensor noise shipped with it. For each supported camera and ISO setting, it contains the measured values of Poissonian and Gaussian components of the sensor noise, so proper denoising becomes a one-click operation. That's as opposed to the much more complicated "drag the luminance and chrominance noise sliders until the noise disappears, then drag two more sliders to recover detail" workflow found, e.g., in ART.
trop 6mo ago
Darktable has a "neural restore" algorithm [0] in the development version (intended for midsummer release). Note: - It appears to be an out-of-band pre-processing stage (run the image through denoise to produce an intermediary TIFF), unlike most other parts of the program. - All AI features are gated behind compile-time flags which default to off. [0] https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/20523 https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/20523
- porphyra 6mo ago
  Wow, that's great news!
sergimansilla 6mo ago
As a Capture One user, I wish Capture One had NN denoising. It is one area in which it can’t touch Lightroom.

t0bia_s 6mo ago

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.

orbital-decay 6mo ago
Photoshop itself, without ACR, is light years behind in color processing. It's a dinosaur at this point. It had only one remotely competent grading plugin (Firegrade), but it seems abandoned.
- t0bia_s 6mo ago
  Name some color process that cannot be done in PS. I'm recommending PS for color grading to be precise.
  - orbital-decay 6mo ago
    You can do anything in a hex editor. The question is how convenient it is.
    - t0bia_s 6mo ago
      Beside Adobe terms of use and implemented spyware, their software is convenient enough to justify monopoly on market. Sure, editing via prompts or personalised automated actions would be ultimate convenience, but we are not here yet. Day by day software like those from Adobe or BlackMagic will be obsolete.
  - t0bia_s 6mo ago
    *not

gyomu 6mo ago

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.

mastermage 6mo ago
Counterpoint most of the Movies budgets is usualy spent on the actors and on the filming. Not on the editing team. There is also copious amounts of money in photography Alot of advertising is still static images and print.
- atoav 6mo ago
  Yes, but if the budget of the whole thing is high(er) they don't tend to cheap out on details that could mske or break it. Or phrased differently: If your shoot codts a million a day it doesn't matter if your camera costs 400 bucks a day or 40. In fact they may ask you whether you really wanna go with the 40-buck camera.
  - mastermage 6mo ago
    > Yes, but if the budget of the whole thing is high(er) they don't tend to cheap out on details that could mske or break it. The evidence does not point to this. There have been copious amounts of movies that hired the Rock and then made the worst CGI in the history of Cinema.
d3vnull 6mo ago
But there's a couple orders of magnitude more photo shoots than movies and since once you write software once, you can copy it for free, investing in creating photo editing software still makes sense.

jiggawatts 6mo ago

> handles so damn well when it comes to color editing I know it sounds shocking to criticise the color editing capabilities of a dedicated colorist tool, but... Resolve only got HDR output support on Windows recently! Up to version 18 or 19 it output gibberish that only specialised (super expensive) monitors could display. So you could have a HDR OLED 4K monitor and you'd get a washed out mess unless you also spent a ton of money on SDI cards for no good reason. Sure, they fixed that now, but the pedigree of "we're a hardware company first, software company second" remains. They're not a photo editing company and have no idea what makes Lightroom "the" industry standard. > conservative culture (photography) vs progressive (video editing) I've found the exact opposite to be true! Lightroom has used "scene referred" (correct) color management since forever. 32-bit float ultra-wide-gamut HDR throughout. This is a "new" feature in Resolve! [1] Similarly, I just tried Resolve 21 photo export and it exports... SDR. Probably in sRGB, who knows? Appears to be totally uncalibrated. Meanwhile Lightroom can export 16-bit PNGs, wide-gamut, true HDR, HDR gain maps, JPEG XL, etc, etc. Resolve is way behind on the basics. [1] There are excuses for this, mostly to do with performance when editing real-time footage vs a still image.

user34283 6mo ago
I tried Resolve just now for Photos, and I'm not impressed. The Sony RAW file rendered terrible compared to Lightroom. I found the interface unintuitive and did not even manage to locate the much praised Color grading features. That tab opens with a Video view. This needs some work to compete with Lightroom for Photos - I see that it's Beta 1, just saying.
- jiggawatts 6mo ago
  I guarantee that it won't improve significantly even after several major releases. Resolve is designed to be controlled with their "panels", which have lots of dials and knobs to turn. The software only interface is clunky at best, and they steadfastly refuse to fix basic usability issues lest that undermine the justification for buying their hardware. For example, cropping and rotating media in Lightroom is a totally different experience compared to Resolve (photo or video, they're both bad!). Lightroom lets you fine-adjust sliders by pressing shift so that instead of rotating an image by HUGE AMOUNTS BACK AND FORTH you can easily remove a 0.4% tilt without having to type in the numbers into an "angle" text input box like a savage. Lightroom's crop and rotate controls do a "constrained crop" by default so that you don't get black wedges in the corners of the image. When the background is already mostly (but not perfectly) black, this can be infuriating to fix in Resolve by alternatively rotating, cropping (numerically!), rotating, cropping etc... While I'm complaining about Resolve issues, it gets the color temperature scale wrong, as per this video, to the point where I find it nearly unusable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WADuXiMZxq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WADuXiMZxq4

orbital-decay 6mo ago

This was always absolutely inexplicable to me. A lot of photographers are just resistant to better color tools (as in, actively arguing against them!) or are in deep denial about their existence. Photography is well behind videography in that regard.

discopicante 6mo ago
I think this has been imprinted in the photographer world due to long-standing requirements from AP, Reuters, etc. on avoiding post-processing. Video has never had these constraints; post-processing is required to publish the works.
- tablatom 6mo ago
  That’s interesting - how do they define that? Surely they don’t publish raw rgb?
  - discopicante 6mo ago
    Reuters banned photos processed from RAW over 10y ago. They will only accept JPEGs from the camera. https://signalprocessingsociety.org/community-involvement/information-forensics-and-security/newsletter/reuters-issues-worldwide-ban-raw https://signalprocessingsociety.org/community-involvement/in... AP has had these rules since the late 90s: "Only the established norms of standard photo printing methods such as burning, dodging, black-and-white toning and cropping are acceptable. Retouching is limited to removal of normal scratches and dust spots." https://niemanreports.org/aps-policy-banning-photo-manipulation/ https://niemanreports.org/aps-policy-banning-photo-manipulat...
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    As mentioned it's impossible to get "unretouched digital photos" because the camera itself does post-processing - but there were some spicy scandals that arguably were somewhere in the gray area between "move a damn pyramid" and "applying normal lighting techniques" that they resolved with "just use JPEG from the camera". Of course, we now know that "JPEG from the camera" can be complete bollocks, so it's going to get worse. https://www.bronxdoc.org/bronx-documentary-center/exhibits/altered-images/gordon-gahan/ https://www.bronxdoc.org/bronx-documentary-center/exhibits/a... https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...

northernsausage 6mo ago

As a professional photographer and mostly stills editor I am really excited to get to learn more advanced colour editing using this software, already using it for some video at a novice level. Thankfully I don't get much video work to do but learning the skills on stills is going to really improve my skills in motion. - I'll wait for the reviews but really looking forward to cancelling my adobe sub.

CyberDildonics 6mo ago

Ironically it works very well to edit a photo in a compositing program which black magic also gives away for free in digital fusion. People just don't know about it or how to use it.

Melatonic 6mo ago
Interesting - how new is their compositing software ?
- CyberDildonics 6mo ago
  It is many decades old but it was bought by black magic.

harrall 6mo ago

I disagree — photography has always been ripe with significant digital alteration of photos. The main issue is that Adobe has been a long time player in the market and they have historically segmented into 4 distinct types of tools: RAW editing (Lightroom), raster editing (Photoshop), vector (Illustrator), and video editing (Premiere). Adobe still dominates in the first 3 categories. Achieving the effects you listed would just happen in Photoshop, and Adobe never cross contaminates their product lines with the same features. You’d need to buy both Lightroom ($12/mo) and Photoshop to do what you want ($20/mo). Want vector editing? $40/mo now. Creative subscriptions are good money to them. You’ll see other companies try to break this segmentation — for example, Affinity combined several categories of tools into one, but when they first released their suite, they actually followed Adobe’s model.

Melatonic 6mo ago
Photoshop has camera raw which is literally what Lightroom is built on - it's basically just a reskin of ACR with cataloguing and other features. After Effects is also huge

alfanick 6mo ago

While Darktable has a lot of nice niche features, from UX point of view it’s 20 years behind any of commercial offerings. If GIMP is like open source Photoshop, then Darktable is like open source Lightroom - both GIMP and Darktable are absolutely crap when it comes to UX, unless you mastered them for 10 years. Darktable should focus on some UX/UI GSOC-like project and figure out their usability to be considered useful.

afarviral 6mo ago
I'm some ways I'd argue the UI of darktable is ahead of its time and fairly snazzy. It's just a much more sophisticated tool. What is one thing about the UI that specifically feels dated? Burried maybe, but dated?

animanoir 6mo ago

[dead]

connorelsea 6mo ago

I've been really pleased with Luminar Neo for photo editing and have been using it alongside Lightroom. Their marketing unfortunately makes it seem like an unserious and gimmicky tool for non-professionals, just due to extreme AI focus and SaaS-ificiation of their website, but it's actually really good software. The core editing tools are on par with Lightroom and have very friendly UX, and some (not all) of the near-gimmick AI features are actually impressive and forward-thinking.

qingcharles 6mo ago
I also use Neo set up as a plugin to Photoshop. This has been my pro setup for like 3 years now. I couldn't do without Neo, it makes some tasks so much quicker than any of the other options.

laughing_me 6mo ago

Because their roles differ, their perspectives differ as well. Photographers create value through photography, while post-production professionals create value by giving the work a new perspective.