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DaVinci Resolve – Photo

blackmagicdesign.com

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Re: DaVinci Resolve – Photo

#131

Post by jiggawatts »

user34283 wrote: post #114
jiggawatts wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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

Re: DaVinci Resolve – Photo

#132

Post by jordand »

googie wrote: post #126

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 whol…

Autodesk have been the same with Maya on Linux. The 2027 version has just been released, and it still doesn't have full Wayland support. The VFX Reference platform doesn't mandate Wayland support. And strangely enough, Maya versions prior to 2025 work perfectly fine on Wayland (they migrated to Qt 6 with 2025)

Re: DaVinci Resolve – Photo

#133

Post by dtf »

googie wrote: post #126

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 whol…

I recently used Resolve (just the free version) for a project. It was my first time seriously using the software but I ended up spending a lot of time with it - lots of timeline editing, keyframe animation, some simple Fusion compositions, and a fair bit of work in the Fairlight page, rendering out daily . I did all this on my beloved Arch Linux workstation, and frankly it was rock solid, apart from exactly one crash when using the timeline keyframe editor - something that was solved by upgrading Resolve to the latest version.

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

Re: DaVinci Resolve – Photo

#134

Post by googie »

roygdavis wrote: post #128
googie wrote: post #126

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 whol…

I got it working with the help of Gemini, here's my chat if you want to try again https://gemini.google.com/share/50fa089e2f2c >

Thanks, but as far as I read it, it's all about the library file names mismatch, which is mostly covered by guides I mentioned earlier. I've done that and I got my DaVinci running. It was just audio output that did not work, despite hours spent on trying to get it work.

Re: DaVinci Resolve – Photo

#135

Post by ksimukka »

jdboyd wrote: post #116
ksimukka wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m an avid user of Fairlight for almost a decade now. The accelerator card has an interesting history (as does Fairlight).

Do you have a link to learn more about that history?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairlight_(company)

Re: DaVinci Resolve – Photo

#137

Post by DrewADesign »

orbital-decay wrote: post #89
arecsu wrote: post #31

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, paramet…

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.

Having done professional design work, photography, video editing, 3D animation, yada, yada, yada: I can’t think of a time where I’ve been unable to achieve my color goals in still photography with PS’s or Lightroom’s tools. For people to bother learning new professional tools, there needs to be a more concrete reason than ’but this is one is technically better.’ For hobbyists that are really into the tech? Sure. For professionals that need real precision and consistency— e.g product photographers shooting a lot of stuff with precisely defined brand colors, wedding photographers whose photos will frequently be looked at in series, or something? Sure. For most, the ROI on the time spent just isn’t there. The use case for more precise and consistent color grading in movies or other professional video is obvious— when all the frames are there sitting next to each other, and subtle color changes can so drastically affect the mood of the piece on a while because it’s so immersive. But most professional images are seen in specific contexts with other elements, often through unpredictable media… those tools just aren’t as useful there. And they’re also more complicated — simplicity is a huge boon for efficiency, and efficiency is really important for professional work.

Re: DaVinci Resolve – Photo

#138

Post by dbspin »

gyomu wrote: post #64
arecsu wrote: post #31

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, paramet…

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 workin…

Fundamental misunderstanding of the market dynamics here.

There are at least an order of magnitude more people making a professional salary as photographers (ie.: enough to justify a software purchase) than professional videographers.

Outside of film, videographers are generally paid a day rate about half as high as photographers, with enormously higher equipment costs.

Film - hollywood, streaming, TV etc, combined actually employ a relatively small number of people. Sure there's enormously more budget for any given TV show than say a wedding photoshoot, but think about how many people get married, how many corporate photo sessions there are etc etc.

Basically by conflating videography and cinematography you've obscured the issue. Source - I'm a videographer that also works as a cinematographer / director on smaller budget projects.

Also on anything bigger than a very low budget short, it's editors and post people who are using the editing software not the videographers / camera operators / DOP. Bare in mind DaVinci does not own the film industry. It's very much still Avid's game, with Nuke for colour, and a small percentage of Adobe Suite.

Re: DaVinci Resolve – Photo

#139

Post by unmole »

tomaskafka wrote: post #125
esperent wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 scie…

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.

The GP refered to "blender of yore". Blender went through major UI overhauls and recent versions are very intuitive.
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