DaVinci Resolve

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.

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 Somehow it relies on some old ALSA API, which is no longer maintained/supported on Ubuntu/Kubuntu, or I'm just too stupid to make it work.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.

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 :\

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.

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)

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/davincir...

This was bound to happen. I've edited stills in Resolve for years thinking this day would come. Resolve has supported DNG raw files (as long as they're not converted from funky sensors such as Fujifilm X-trans). But, it was always a bit of a hack.

Kind of stoked to see this release even though I've transitioned to a 100% open source photo workflow on Linux now.

IMO, most exciting developments in photo editing today happens in open source. But this is really something.

How do they actual make money? I've been using Resolve for years without paying for it (and without thinking about its business model too much). It seems that they sell quite expensive professional hardware so I assume the software users are just compensated by hardware users?

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?

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

This honestly made my day. I’ve been looking for a way to manage my photos on Linux for a while. Lightroom has been the only reason I’ve stuck with a Mac.

If I can switch to a photo editor that lets me process everything properly, skip the monthly subscription, and not have Adobe tracking all over my system—that’s exactly what I want.

This feels like a dream come true. Really amazing.

I'm 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.

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.

Please release me from Adobe Lightroom.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

As someone who doesn't edit photos:

1) How does this compare to Affinity Photo?

2) Is there an iPad version?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?