DaVinci Resolve – Photo

Movies routinely have 8 or 9 digit budgets, with teams of hundreds of people who have to collaborate to make footage coming from dozens of different cameras look seamless and consistent. Meanwhile, $1M would be an insane budget for a photo shoot.

You can see this in the actual skills of people working in the field as well. Anyone working in video has a solid understanding of the technical underpinnings of their craft. On the other hand, it’s not uncommon for working photographers to not understand some really basic stuff about color science/data formats/etc.

As a casual photographer, I wanted to love darktable and I'm sure it's extremely capable. But the UI is just so hard to get to grips with. I've put a few hours into it, tried following some tutorials etc. but I have no idea what I'm doing there.

I do have a fairly decent grasp of color science from working in 3d graphics so it's not that I'm lacking there. I guess it's like blender of yore. It could become mainstream but it would require a full UI overhaul and in the meantime it's for experts only, or determined people with a lot more time on their hands than I have.

I 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.

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.

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.

It helps you build and run Resolve in a Docker or Podman container. I’ve personally used it on Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch-based setups (well, CachyOS), and it’s worked great for me.

Right now it supports Nvidia very well. I’m also personally working on adapting it for AMD GPUs so I can run Resolve on my Strix Halo workstation.

One especially nice thing about this setup is that I can run multiple versions of Resolve on the same computer. If a new beta comes out, no problem — I can build a new container and try it out while keeping my stable version as my daily workhorse.

I was really impressed by how well it worked for me on Linux.

I think these things might have helped:

- I use an X11 desktop (Cinnamon), not Wayland. I've tried it out on a GNOME Wayland desktop but it seemed quite a bit more clunky and froze frequently.

- PipeWire runs the system's audio routing, so Resolve just appears as another ALSA client, and I can then use wiremix to send to my preferred speakers or headphones. (I haven't tried any audio input yet)

- I didn't try to install Resolve natively, I used davincibox [1] to install and update it within a container (it uses distrobox, which then uses podman).

I'll now be purchasing the studio version, which hopefully will work as well.

[1] https://github.com/zelikos/davincibox

The ALSA issues are beyond aggravating at this point. You do not want to actually run ALSA directly, you need it to connect to pulseaudio on 24.04. But I still have never been able to record audio within resolve. I've had mixed luck on newer wayland+pipewire setups with having to install the bridge packages to connect the different backends. Linux audio is cursed on its own so I don't fully blame BMD.

I exclusively run Kubuntu and have been using makeresolvedeb[1] for installing resolve and it has been pretty good.

[1] https://www.danieltufvesson.com/makeresolvedeb

I guess everyone forgot that Pentax still exists.

I've just installed DaVinci and pointed it at my photos from this year and so far it's been frozen for 8 minutes, not initially confidence inspiring.

If you know how to do masking with video in Davinci, then it all just applies to photos too. I tried today some basic Magic Mask and color tab editing with photos, and it works exactly the same (without the annoying waiting time on huge videos for Magic Mask, ofc).

Isn't it exactly what it is?

The bookshelf is looking sus too.

A further bit of a tangent, but anyway: what really strikes me is the choice of such an image to represent whatever they're trying to convey. It feels bland, and there's a kind of underlying sadness to it... the books, the small sculpture, the shelf, the desk... it all drags me down.

I'm pretty sure the "fakeness" is intentional. The image seems designed to appeal to a specific target audience (when I look at their 'AI erase/replace tool' example I get a clear idea).

Used to have lunch regularly with one of the owners too. Need to check in with him again!

At least back in 2019, BMD made a lot of money selling professional licences for DaVinci Resolve. I don't know exact figures but that part of the business was healthily profitable of its own accord. Very, very healthily profitable!

Most parts of the business were profitable standalone, AFAIK. Their model didn't revolve around loss leaders, burning VC money or anything like that; just selling good products at fair prices and making bank.

I think a big part of it was a fairly lean culture (whole company was bootstrapped and grown sustainably), and specifically in the case of DaVinci they bought out an existing business that had already done a lot of the development and marketing work for absolute peanuts.

Very smart team doing good work.

They also sell a paid version, if you want a few extra features.

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/13So6ZuVx3dn2jZCw7cm3LkbzydF...

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.

I have just verified that Dehancer Pro for DaVinci Resolve works perfectly with the Photo mode of the new beta. So if you're on subscription - you can use both plugins and see what's best for you.

I personally didn't like the new Photo mode because it's clearly intended for video editors and not photographers at all.

On that note, is this supported on Linux?

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.

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.

Might give this a try. I just keep on holding back because I do not want to lose all my thousands upon thousands of edits.

what does this mean? it is an editor

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.

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).