Why do we have different tools [*] to process data in video and photo-editing software?
Replace “data” with either video or photographs; “video-editing software” with Davinci Resolve for example, and “photo-editing software” with Darktable, RawTherapee etc.
The standard paradigm to do color grading in Resolve for example is the trio of colored wheels called lift/gain/gamma; in DT/RT it’s the curves.
Now that I’ve mentioned it, why is it called “color-grading” when doing video and … something else (I simply call it processing, or fixing the colors, not sure if there’s other terms on that) when doing the same thing on photographs?
[*] I know that what I’ve just written is not entirely true, I mean in Kdenlive I also use curves because they’re available, and this is what I know. But back when I was on Mac OS I used for some time Davinci Resolve and I had to learn the lift/gain/gamma colored wheels; from screenshots of Adobe Premiere I understand that this is also the standard tool for video production.
I think that at least a part of it has to do with the differences in how workflow is handled in each. Photography tends to be a “singular” effort, that is, a “one-man-band” sort of endeavor, where most if not all of the tasks from capture to export are done by one person. In video production, more people are usually involved, with some specialization in tasks, so there needs to be specific communication regarding with both what those tasks are and their inputs and outputs. That’s part of the motivation behind the “scene-referred” stricture of 0.18 as middle gray; gives all the folks who produce or mangle content a common tonal anchor for their stuff.
Just my musings, observing a lot of this through a soda straw…
Also, video people have all of the expensive and fancy equipment, historically and currently. The software and hardware controls often mirror each other; knob, sliders, touchpads, etc. I have yet to see a bulletin-board-like hardware used to map a curve 1-to-1.
