Not open source, of course, but it’s still interesting from a broader photo-editing perspective. This will surely stir things up in the proprietary/commercial space. Pressure on Adobe is always welcome, whatever direction it may come from.
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For people that don’t already edit video, I think this will be way too complicated.
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Looks like an interesting product, although their promotional photos in that page all look a bit off, hard to pinpoint exactly why.
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The basic version is free, and runs on Linux. It’s also blazing fast compared to e.g. Lightroom. That’s going to put some pressure on Adobe.
More importantly for us, it uses a node based editing structure and its tools are closer to the scene referred darktable pixelpipe than Lightroom’s model. This might popularize these sorts of editing tools, and hopefully provide some inspiration for new tools.
I’ll certainly play with it!
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Hello @bastibe
More importantly for us, it uses a node based editing structure
Yeah.
It could be useful for the users who already have tried and like vkdt.
Even though, with all due respect for vkdt, DaVinci Resolve is way more powerful (although not open source…) and its colour grading tools are probably among the best on the market.
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My limited experience with Resolve “Color Grading” for video is that “you need to know what you are doing.”
Let’s say you are not using a color-managed workflow. Your first node should be either a LUT or Color Space Transform to convert from the camera working space to some wide color space. But the choice of this space is up to the user. The work flow typically ends from another LUT or CST into the display space. So far it’s not so difficult.
But if you wish to change the color/tone/exposure/contrast etc., there are many options for adding nodes for those purposes. You could, for example, decide you want a node just to do exposure. But even for that you should decide if you want to change the “gamma” to linear as an example.
You may also put several adjustments in one node. But that can make tracking changes challenging. You can also create node branches and combine results later. It can get complex quickly.
For me personally, the pixelpipe and modules in dt still present a huge advantage for photography.
For creating videos that include photos (which is what I do), I may decide to apply “look” nodes to photos imported from dt. I’ve tried this once with good success - I start with a neutral-color edit in dt and apply the same look-nodes to photos and video. So I do not expect to use Resolve as a raw editor. At least for now.
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Do you use DaVinci Resolve on Linux? If yes, what distro and how did you install it?
Free or paid version?
Outside of the distro (and a specific version of it) that DaVinci currently supports (Rocky Linux 8.6) I can recommend uBlue based distros/images. They offer managed installation of Resolve via ujust.
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won’t be an alternative for those who complain, darktable to be too complex for average users 
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I think the free version is limited to 3840 x 2160 resolution.
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I use Nobara Linux. There is an installer that handles all of the dependencies.
Yes, that is the export limitation for the free version, as best I can recall. Also, there are limitations on video file decoding. To use the free version, I transcode video into ProRes before import, then export as ProRes, then transcode the exported video to H.264 to reduce the file size. I have a new pc that handles the transcoding well.
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That was the limit for video, does it apply to photo, too?
This was a pretty decent overview…some tools and AI features only work on the paid version but still there is a lot that you can do it would appear…
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So, I’ve tried it. The beta of the free version on MacOS. It’s a little rough around the edges, let’s say.
As in, it doesn’t properly tone map highlights in my Fuji raw file (overexposes red and blue, highlights go magenta). No matter, it has a scene referred tone curve so that’s easily rescued. A few DNGs worked better.
After that, the editing tools and scopes are very nice. The node based editing works well. Good stuff.
Exporting does not currently work. JPEG export downright fails, other formats render with a huge black border. Not usable. But for the record, it had no limits in the UI for exporting at full resolution.
Anyway, it’s a beta. And it’ll be free.
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Cool.
The Film Look Creator is not free though.
And neither are most of the effects or the AI tools. But the fact that the basic raw developer is free, and runs on Linux, is still commendable.
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Using the studio version on nobara.
I rarely use it for photo editing because I miss so many conveniences that I m used to from dt. Large numbers of images can’t be culled or batch processed. But if you want to achieve a certain look or effect you can do that very well. Also, it is very robust in the sense that it is hard to make an image look really badly processed.
Holy. Made my comment before watching the video. I need to update to 21.
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Nice. I try installing version 21 on Ubuntu, still no luck. Could you please share your installation process? Thanks!
Today I tried out Sobotka’s AgX DCTL for DaVinci Resolve. It works as advertised, but it requires the DCTL effect, which is a non-free option. The UI is very bare bones compared to darktable.
The whole effects panel seems to contain a lot of really powerful things. Among these are denoising, sharpening, local contrast, dehaze etc. But the best thing about it is that you can apparently add third party effects, which then run as independent nodes in the processing graph.
I additionally played with the various curves. There are regular luma-luma tone curves, but also luma-saturation and hue-luma curves and every other combination of the three. Also, there’s a hue-spider-diagram where you can push and pull colors across the hue/luma space.
This is really good stuff, I have to say. It won’t be replacing darktable for me, any time soon. All of Adobehood is saying the same. But the fact that this is free, and that there are loads of tutorials for it out there, and that it offers a very smooth transition path to video editing; I bet that’s very enticing for lots of people.
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The color-warper is quite powerful too. First introduced in Baselight (from a competitor to Blackmagicdesign), Resolve had the feature a year later.
If you can run dctls I’d recommend OpenDRT and Juan Pablo Zambranos JP2499 as output transforms.
Resolves own output transform isn’t bad either but those two are very flexible.
The free version has usable film-print-emulations from Fuji and Kodak filmstocks.
What is the most striking workflow I am looking forward to is separating per-picture grading (primaries, secondaries) and picture-set looks.
As you can have node trees for
- clips (so in photo-albums per picture),
- groups (including pre- and post-groups) and
- the whole timeline (album).
You can have even more layers of node-trees, but for now I don’t need those.
But that is a feature (separating grade and look) which is almost impossible to manage in a raweditor.
And finally the amount of tutorials on youtube is the key resource here, as almost everything applies to photo workflows as well. While its a very complicated and powerful program, the knowledge base is far greater than in the opensource-raweditor space. Imho that balances things out a bit, one can find the right teacher for oneself.
Some people are relying heavily on third party dctls as there is where new tools get developed fast and tailored to the needs of colorists. Notable mentions are Mononodes, Iridescent Color, Kaur Hendrikson, HALpictures and probably two or three that I forgot.
If people need inspo what the next tool for opensource raw-editors could be, check those guys out!
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