DaVinci Resolve 21(blackmagicdesign.com) |
DaVinci Resolve 21(blackmagicdesign.com) |
(Can confirm - I just opened it on my laptop (I had the latest beta installed) and it prompted me to download the release version)
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That was the blocker for me. Kdenlive does
Also excited about the picture stuff. I'm on an aging Lightroom version and wouldn't mind something that works well on Linux. Also huge plus point is the licensing model.
At this point we need a Kickstarter campaign to make Lightroom run in Wine/Proton (no, no matter how much you try, it will not work so far). Edit: or GSOC to support Darktable to improve their UX.
If Darktable had a grant/GSOC just to improve UX, it could be a valid competitor to Lightroom. Currently, it's not. It's bunch of Python/Lua scientific code with some UI, that processes pictures.
For anyone not in the know, Resolve has an exceptionally capable and feature rich free version. A lot of the AI features (and >4k editing) are locked to the Studio licence which is a one-time payment, but works simultaneously on two computers (including different OS's) and allows upgrades across major versions.
I spent less than $300 on it a decade ago and my licence works fine on new v21 released this week. My least-regretted software purchase in 3 decades.
It sucks, but I just can't justify their insane pricing scheme. I've been looking for Linux-capable tools for a while, and Darktable / Rawtherapee are a long way from what I'm after. What you describe sounds like a dream.
Without updates included, buying a lifetime license nowadays feels more like a subscription which expires as soon as your OS upgrades instead. It also creates a lot of friction with different file formats when you try to collaborate. companies know how to exploit this to force you into subscriptions.
Recently I edited a few images requiring removing extra people from the frame and I was able to do all editing in Lightroom, in seconds.
As much as I dislike Adobe, Lightroom’s shortcuts and flow are now habits.
I will likely continue using both.
I assumed they would add them later, I hope I'm right!
edit: nope, still only supports Canon, Fuji, Nikon, Sony and iPhone ProRAW.
I already used Davinci to make a custom LUT, blended it with the Adobe camera standard profile to use in lightroom as a base for all my edits as Davinci's color tools are much better, and doing it this way just lets you get tones that you couldn't other wise get with Lighroom/ACR alone. This basically removes the need to have lightroom in there as a finishing step.
The only downside is by now I've got a really solid ImagenAI profile based on the 30k photos I've fed it over time, and that obviously relies on a lightroom catalog, and is also capable of applying my LUT since I've made it a slider in LR. I hate adobe, but I'm not sure I could go back to not using Imagen as now I can turn around a full wedding gallery in about 2 days.
I have a bunch of photos from a Mini 3 Pro and Mini 4 Pro -- 4 years' worth -- that I haven't published because I don't have a way to process them.
No tools on Linux (RawTherapee, Darktable, RapidRAW) render their colors correctly no matter how you mess with the sliders, and all of the Github issue pages are dismissive of the problem. There is something fundamentally wrong about how Linux RAW libraries are reading DJI photos.
Lightroom on a Mac tested on another computer renders them all correctly, but I don't own a Mac nor Lightroom.
I moved my team to Resolve about 2.5 years ago and I can say with absolute confidence Fusion > AE. Resolve Studio is all you need, period. Lightroom is clearly better right now than their Photo editor but like all their other offerings (ehhh except fairlight lol still mediocre), it's only a matter of time
When it works, it's really nice and I'm sold on the node based workflows, but it's not all entirely roses.
Resolve itself is excellent, Fairlight works just Ok and is still heaps better than Audition ever was. But Fusion I feel like hasn't seen enough love in the past few years.
The whole Reactor setup for installing Fuses feels really broken and for the free users they disabled those entirely in version 19.1.
I am pretty experienced linux user and i would have to buy new NVIDIA card and pray things work out.
Sadly i found out it will be much cheaper to buy refurb mac mini. So now i have dedicated machine for editing video.
Having said that, for all the AI features, the big one would be setting key frames etc. with an agent, driving the general editing workflow with text,etc. I realize this is non trivial but it's certainly viable for a team of this calibre.
I think if BM added a paid for agent which helped execute their traditional video editing tools (even if it "only" supported a subset) then that's a subscription a lot of people would be willing to pay for, especially as their core tool is so generous.
But their priorities are not always well-set. In Resolve, significant problems remain while more and more functionality is hastily slapped on.
The so-called "integration" with Fusion remains very poor. Compositions' presence in timelines is extremely fragile, and inexplicably degrades source material's resolution to that of the target timeline. This means that if one of your timelines is HD but you bring UHD clips into Fusion, they will be degraded to HD upon ENTRY to your Fusion comp, before they ever get to the timeline. So in Fusion all of your keys and other selective image processing will be chunky garbage.
Also: If you start a project, import your footage, and then drag a clip to the timeline... Resolve will offer to change the frame rate of the timeline to match. But NOTHING ELSE. Every other major NLE offers to match the timeline to the first incoming footage in ALL regards. But not Resolve, despite years and years of vociferous complaints in their forum. This is a basic, expected feature but ignored by BMD.
And finally a core issue: multiple, unrelated node views scattered about. Resolve needs to consolidate them into a single node view for all processing. That would flesh out Resolve's half-assed "integration" of four or five other products and provide a game-changing workflow that is long overdue.
Not that I spent any extra money on the license compared to what the camera itself costed, but I also feel like the 0 money I spent was well spent :) Harder about the time commitment to move from something you know really well to something new, but the time I spent on that was very well worth it too.
It's a baffling process flow if you're coming from Lightroom or a manual ACR workflow. But I'm excited to see where this goes. Quite simply, the output results are great. And free!
(I also love that Blackmagic are ultimately a hardware company, and covet the various input devices they have for specific tasks that I can't even slightly justify buying)
I don't think their use of it is bad at all, I'm just tired.
Putting "AI" into the feature title means "this time it actually works"
My opinion is that, for end users, if you name your feature "AI" to market it, you kind of already failed to read the room. You're writing to VCs while hoping it convinces customers.
Name what the feature does, what it gains them. Call it "smart" if you must imply some black box treatment.
Naming AI as the selling point for everything feels a lot like that Android tablet ad circa 2010:
"Your wife will love the new dual core Tegra™ chipset!"
I'd also get tired if it was "AI ala Microsoft/Google" where the goal is to get you to write forever with a chat bot somewhere else, but these features are very different from that.
My favorite glitch that has persisted for many versions is how if you background it while it is launching, the GUI becomes frozen and the only way to use it is to kill the process and then launch it again making sure to not switch to any other apps while it loads. The worst one that comes to mind, because it happens all the time when I am using it, is when you hit undo once it could undo multiple recent changes (never know how many exactly, just have to guess), and if you then redo in panic it would only redo one of them, so you have to manually do it (fun when it involves fine color adjustments). For my own sanity will not try remembering all the other ones. In addition, a lot of counter-intuitive design choices, messy color management, etc.
Proprietary cross-platform software for multimedia production tends to be polished but Resolve genuinely feels worse than an Electron app, with subtle delays and micro-freezes in many interactions.
To be fair now with all those “AI” features they could probably say it is optimized for “agents” or something…
That's not really a critique on the software -- it's not trying to be what it's not. But the criticism of the software is painted by the fact that it's hard to get good at it. Well ok I will critique it: the user interface is garbage. Like they studied old versions of Gimp and thought, "let's do even worse".
The metaphor isn't perfect, but it's got some of that ol' TIMTOWTDI Perl feeling to it.
I couldn't get Resolve to run on my discrete-GPU-less PC running Fedora. First the lack of RPM or Flatpak were lame, but integrated graphics was the real killer.
I started learning Blender VSE and walked away super impressed. Finally found my editor. (Spent years getting used to Premiere on Mac and PC.) It runs good even though I don't have a dedicated GPU yet, unlike Resolve. (And Blender is a full-on 3D modeller, I should note.)
I'm going to scale up my hardware eventually, but right now my editing needs aren't huge. Just chopping and splicing up stuff for YouTube. Blender's VSE is incredibly good for my use case.
edit: I may need to give the OpenShot 3.x a chance. The OpenShot release history [1] makes the claim that they have addressed many of my complaints
I even briefly considered using ffmpeg and bash to get the edits I wanted...
Blender has a complicated UI but at least it feels completely consistent and thought-through. And also like it wasn't designed 20 years ago. I just have more confidence using Blender than others because it's so big, respected and known.
My learning process is basically "How do I do this thing I did in Premiere?" and basic Googling/YouTubing. I needed a tutorial video to get started but otherwise if you know NLEs it shouldn't be too hard.
I also have a Macbook Air M2 running Asahi Linux.
Also nice is built in loop (ping pong) animations! No more duplicating keyframes!
https://kylekukshtel.com/building-video-podcast-resolve-audi...
Will it allow me to drastically improve my workflow (save time for some tedious tasks), increase quality of the outputs etc?
I'm a Premiere migrant to Resolve (Studio) some years ago, biggest hurdle is the opinionated workflow, it basically wants you to use the tabs in the bottom to go from "Media > Cut > Edit > Color > Fusion > Audio > Deliver" (simplified) so different tools available in different areas, made for different use cases, but in general once you've learnt the overall and high-level concepts, it makes editing really easy and smooth.
Besides, it's probably the most stable video editor that runs natively on Linux since ever, I think I've had it crash once, and the Fusion 3D text doesn't work properly for me, but besides that, runs like a dream and UX is miles ahead anything else available.
It does take some getting used to, but the amount of tutorial content on YouTube is another reason I'm happy I made the switch. A lot of really good stuff on there. (Search on 'DaVinci Resolve Fusion' to see some examples of it in action if you want to get a feel).
I’ve used FCP for a long time but have never loved it. I also have some experience with non-destructive workflows like Blender geonodes and have heard that Resolve adopts a similar paradigm. Definitely curious!
Industry-standard NLE's like Premiere or Avid are probably the closest to Resolve. But even those are legacy programs that rest on their moats, whereas Resolve takes far more chances and does far less dumb shit than Adobe and Avid.
The seamless integration with industry-standard grading software is also... um mindblowing. Premiere has Lumetri and FCP has it'd colour correction tab, both of which are like MS Paint compared to Resolve's colour capabilities.
It's also free. The paid version unlocks mostly things to do with grading.
It works pretty well. I tried it this morning and in about 15 minutes I had recorded and edited a three minute video.
(I've used AI transcription in resolve before, not this is actually editing the transcript with an llm and then inserting the clips. I also did breath detection and b roll placement. The Python scripting later is poorly documented and only supports a subset of the functionality of Resolve.)
To be clear, my use case is making weekly online videos suck a little less - not grading feature films :)
https://github.com/mhadifilms/dvr/
You can also try pointing Claude to the API surface directly.
The result might be chaotic, but you should be able to automate editing... maybe. :-) Ha. (You'd need a good loop to make sure Claude can see what it's doing..? Beyond screenshots I mean - ie how would Claude know its doing a good job editing?)
I know a lot of people are/will build this. I would be specifically interested in Black Magic doing it first party.
Where as marketing at all these corporation is trying to genericize "AI features" into anything using an algorithm. "Content aware fill", something we've had for over a decade is now "AI object removal"
"Noise suppression" is "AI voice extraction"
Motion unblur is now "AI motion unblur".
My bigger concern is that these neural network based solutions have taken the place of the former rather than supplemented them. Many tools no longer provide the algorithmic/kernel-based approach at all, and have marketed the “AI” (née ML) alternative as a strict superset/upgrade, despite its potential drawbacks.
(Interestingly while the inference-based implementations generally have higher latency (or infinitely worse, cloud and pay-as-you-go requirements), for some computationally difficult kernels the inference-based approach is actually faster!
Editing is a craft. You have to watch everything, otherwise you don't know what you have.
A machine organising stringouts and selects can work for interviews, but not for action. But even then it is only parsing your media for semantic intent. It misses the way things are said, which often imparts a different meaning.
You can use AI features for editing. But it is unlikely you will be making anything very intetesting.
For interviews, this saves hundreds of hours. Giant amounts of social content are now interview-like, including podcasts.
Your argument makes little sense to me. For narrative editing, this is a minor help. For interview-like content it cuts work by 30-70% maybe. its probably a gamechanger.
What? It bears no impact on if what you're making is interesting or not, couldn't matter less. People been creating amazing things with nothing, and absolute trash with everything, and also vice-versa, seems to be all up to the person's taste and skill, and less to do with the actual tools they use.
the more SFX-end ones like facial aging and face reshaper, or the talent-replacing ones like speech cloning/ADR, feel both too prescriptive for a director to dial in what they aesthetically want, and also not good enough for the final cut. so I struggle to find where they'd be actually useful in a workflow as opposed to being a trap, looking just fine enough at a glance to sneak into a final cut while looking poor when viewed by the audience.
likewise the focal adjustment and upscaling just feel gross. the kinds of things a good cinematographer can already do, and it'll be so so tempting to use tools instead of taking time to do it right in camera because it'll look good enough in the editing bay, but I feel like it'd really stand out as fake in the final cut unless you're targeting like, heavily compressed social ads. the less you use them the better they'll work, which isn't ideal for a marquee feature.
if the blemish remover really does respect continuity it'd be a nice-to-have, but it also feels like another trap to be careless/cheap on things like makeup or lighting at the shoot, at the expense of looking fake in post
I think that's the broader angle that bugs me the most. all of these tools are convenience tools for editors, but in the end they'll really be justifications for directors/producers/studios/agencies to cheap out and do shittier work faster on the shoot. a cheap, shitty shoot covered in AI bandaids is still going to hit an audience like a cheap, shitty shoot.
Artists appreciate and use time saving tools. The AI features in Lightroom, for example, are very well received by photographers (myself included). Automatic subject, background, sky, body part masking, content-aware/generative fill and generative remove are genuinely helpful and time saving.
Different stories shown with different treatment. With CGI, scenes zoomed out to wider shots and effects swelled even louder over lighting, intimacy, acting, etc.
Old styles didn't disappear or stop evolving entirely, of course, but the center of attention profoundly shifted and the "big" production money went with jt.
Generative AI will likely drive some kind of analogous shift in dominant film aesthetics. I don't know where, but I'm not particularly excited by it myself yet.
Likewise, there's been a ton of movies since that could in theory have been done purely with SFX instead of VFX, but which is probably must better from having used VFX/CGI, titles like The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Inception, Avatar, etc.
Obviously there was also charm in titles like E.T. and Gremlins, and I think there might still be a market for movies like that, such as the 2019 Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (I loved the 1982 version as a child, though this sequel wasn't for me).
I guess the question is: will generative AI allow new movies to be made, the same way that CGI has? Or will it just be an economic shift: the same quality CGI but at a fraction of the price?
There may still be people out there who believe that AI will never be able to create CGI as good as humans can, these might be the same people who used to say that CGI can never look realistic. And if you work in VFX, I bet that you can spot a fake mountain with the slightly incorrect shadows in the distance easily, but as a simple movie watcher, I really don't see it, especially when it's only on screen for like 3 seconds.
If you look at the ten top-grossing films in the past 15 years, it's almost exclusively computer animations or SFX showcases with some token, quip-based acting thrown in every now and then (all the Marvel universe stuff).
Basically, I'm not even sure if replacing actors with AI would be stylistically perceptible for the average moviegoer. There are interesting films still being made, but almost no one is watching them, because you have the option to watch some SFX explosions and flying superheroes in Avengers VII.
Maybe there is something wrong with you system?
I use it pretty infrequently nowadays and I admit I didn’t see the startup freeze in a couple months (either I am lucky or they finally fixed it in a recent update), the undo glitch is alive as ever though.
Some other things off the top of my head:
• UI freezes for a second or two when you switch to Fusion tab.
• If you adjust speed in a Fusion node, timeline clip remains the same length, so if you slow it down 2x you can only see the first half. To say Fusion in general is half-baked is to be very, very generous.
• Export location gets reset every launch.
• Can’t copy-paste a node or its settings, in case you want to test between two different configurations.
Even the aforementioned RawTherapee (which is made using Qt I think and which is far from a shining example of usability) is more pleasant to use for me.
I can’t see myself paying for that. What I do now can be done using a mix of free software (ffmpeg, etc.) and if I were to go pro and have less time for tinkering then it’d be FCP for me…
Funny, that's how I think of easy/beginner modes: "in the way, preventing me from getting something done".
As you say, that does mean the learning curve is pretty steep, but it's not as bad as some professional grade software. I was able to get to a point of being able to do some basic video editing/export with it in a few hours of watching YouTube videos and reading documentation. By no means am I an expert but I really appreciate that this is actually software designed to get out of your way and allow focusing on the task at hand without constant popups asking if I've tried some feature I don't have any interest in.
Have you read the beginners guide? https://documents.blackmagicdesign.com/UserManuals/DaVinci-R...
At 643 pages it's surprisingly short for how many subjects it introduces. Going further you'll of course want to read In the Blink of an Eye.(978-1879505629) and the Color Correction Handbook (978-0133435542).
And the actual Resolve manual is also really really good. https://documents.blackmagicdesign.com/UserManuals/DaVinci_R...
You might want to stay away from very recent major versions for stability, but it is a very capable editor that is also much more robust and performant than openshot.
I haven't compared with Blender VSE though.
I think your mistake is to assume editing is like painting, where you can just make something brilliant with a few colours and a canvas. But editing is much more analogous to writing a book. If you have read extensively on Ancient Rome and spent time comprehending the subject, you will create something far more interesting than essentially remixing a few primer books and articles that have suggested to you by an LLM.
People have indeed "been creating amazing things with nothing" in the expressive arts, but that approach falls short when the value comes from communicating depth from narrative information.
But in Resolve they're an afterthought.
The other huge problem in Resolve is failure to distinguish between clips (references to video files) and timeline events (the usage of part of a clip in the timeline). If you want to change the grade on an entire shot, no matter where it's used in the timeline, the logical thing to do is apply the grade to the clip in the bin. Then all timeline events that refer to it would reflect the change.
But no. To this day I don't know how to reliably change the grade of all uses of a clip. It's a huge PITA and leads to errors in your results.
Yeah I've used previous Studio versions to edit videos from my camera without any trouble. I'm just excited to finally ditch my Adobe subscription ASAP. :-)
The docs page is incorrect, I was able to load my Lumix RAW files in no problem.
Repeating a point I made in another comment: in DV it is possible to edit hue to hue, hue to saturation, hue to luminesce, luminesce to saturation, saturation to saturation and saturation to luminesce. There is also the amazing chroma warp, using which near arbitrary color adjustments can be made. Nothing out there comes even close to that capability. No wonder most Hollywood movies are color graded in DV.
They are both PatchMatch (well the healing brush certainly is), which is a heroic bit of code. Entirely deterministic statistical algorithm. Not AI by really any definition (including back then)
I don’t know enough about anything to determine which opinion is correct.
Is AI output not just matrix multiplication and a random seed?
But what I would observe is that the healing brush does not have a random seed. It will always do the same thing if applied at the same pixel.
(I am actually less sure if content-aware fill randomises; I always got the impression it did not)
This makes it both incredibly powerful and occasionally frustrating.
Because on the one hand, you can learn to apply your judgement to precisely control what it will do, and change the radius or position if you learn it is likely to fail, which becomes instinctive. I absolutely love using it to fix scratches in film scans; it's a quick, precise, controllable tool that can be used in a way that is amazingly convincing, and it ends up quite a "zen gardening" thing as a result. It'll sell you on the cheapest wacom pen once you know how efficient it can be.
On the other hand there are situations where it simply cannot work the way you want because it will always find a pattern you don't want it to.
(You can sometimes use the clone brush tool first, to manually break up the pattern that patchmatch will find)
Any particular AI output is deterministic (and can be calculated by hand even, if you're immortal).
But it's not deterministic in the sense that (a) it's a black box on the Cloud, (b) repeated AI prompts don't give the same results.
FYI, In DV it is possible to edit hue to hue, hue to saturation, hue to luminesce, luminesce to saturation, saturation to saturation and saturation to luminesce. There is also the amazing chroma warp, using which near arbitrary color adjustments can be made. Nothing out there comes even close to that capability. No wonder most Hollywood movies are color graded in DV.
That being said, the new photo editing functionality of DaVinci is not the smoothest. The DaVinci app is a bit of a Frankenstein. The editor is a development laid on top of the original DaVinci color app. The audio page (Fairlight) and the VFX module (Fusion) were purchases which were acquired and 'glued on'. Moving from one to the other can be clunky - though not as bad an experience as Adobe's dynamic links.
100% this.
Maybe I live in a bubble, but consumer sentiment regarding AI seems extremely negative. Boasting "AI" features is more likely to lose sales than to create them.
This is way to broad, there is a whole slew of creators, at different scales with different motivations and what not, you can't really say that such a large group loves/hates anything.
Personally, I see video professionals loving AI features that save them boring work, same as for me as a programmer and hobbyist video editor, yet we want to manually do the interesting stuff.
Professional creators working at a corporation probably love AI.
Amateur independent creators that weren't making any money from their art hate AI and use it as a scapegoat. They weren't getting commissions before, and now they're claiming it's because AI is replacing commissioned art.
If something has compiled some great selects for me, I only have material based on what is said. But I don't know how it is said - which to me is everything. Yes, this goes for podcasts too. What I make just won't be as good as if I'd have taken the time to go through everything.
I even notice this with things like NBA highlights. It's clear the editor (or bot) never watched the game. There were moments in it that are interesting and significant. Even small incidents that are actually clutch to the outcome of the match. But it is clear they've quickly compiled all of the goals and bashed out something mediocre which does not tell the story.
In a narrative film or a project of my own I’d care. In a project for hire under a tight deadline?
Why would I? The delivery is the delivery. That’s how commercials go, at least. Clients dont ask - have you seen every bit of footage - they ask - is it ready for deadline.
Grouping close-together changes of the same control for undo sounds probably intentional to me, like how Ctrl+Z in a textbox doesn't go one character at a time, and if I move something with arrow keys I'd expect that to be one "movement" once I stop rather than one per key repeat. Whether it's grouping too aggressively to the point of being recognized as an issue is probably down to personal preference, though I would lean towards agreeing that less grouping would be better.
Given a model architecture that supports it, greedy decoding + the same inputs + prompts, that's true for most LLMs today too, I don't think people consider them less/more AI because of that.
Anyway, I tried them, and found that, after you master the "a few rough brush strokes + adjust feathering and mask opacity until it snaps" and "overzealous brush + parametric mask" techniques taught in any Darktable course, for wildlife photo editing, AI doesn't bring much. And yes, this does require a course to break the "perfect mask is required" mindset.
Yes, Lightroom courses will brainwash you that AI "select subject, select sky, select object" workflow is the only modern way to do selective editing, but this is the Lightroom workflow. For Lightroom, it is a natural workflow, because it is, in Lightroom, the best strategy that can create a mask that aligns well with the object edges - until it doesn't. Other editors (such as ART and Darktable) have other idiomatic workflows for masking, and they work, because they have other tools than Lightroom for snapping the mask or refining it.
Bird feathers spread out on the tips of their wings are one particularly bad example where AI struggles, but non-AI tools don't.
Guilty as charged. However,... from a certain point of view image editing is all about color. I guess the exception would be Adobes new generation of object selection tools, which are hard to best. DaVinci has such tools but they are more suited to editing movies.
• UI freezes for a second or two when you switch to Fusion. - that’s weird
• If you adjust speed in a Fusion node, timeline clip remains the same length, so if you slow it down 2x you can only see the first half. To say Fusion in general is half-baked is to be very, very generous. - Again never had this issue
• Export location gets reset every launch. - It remembers my last export settings per project
• Can’t copy-paste a node or its settings, in case you want to test between two different configurations. - I have copy pasted many fusion and color nodes without issues
Have you reported these issues to Black Magic?
I have used a lot of editing software like old school Final Cut Pro, premiere, Sony Vegas (yuck!) and even movie maker. Resolve in my opinion has the least amount of friction to use. What do you use to edit?
Again, if Fusion implementation on Windows is different that this is not an issue, that is an even bigger red flag.
> Have you reported these issues to Black Magic?
No, there’s too many, and I can’t be bothered. Pretty old threads about it can be found online. Nothing changes.
I explained how it happens. Intentional or not, it just takes us between buggy software and poorly designed software and even then losing changes (not all of what is undone is redone and you are left in an inconsistent state) remains a bug.
> Ctrl+Z in a textbox doesn't go one character at a time
Retyping text is not comparable to readjusting different fine color controls on different pages of the UI across different nodes.
By comparison, the aforementioned RawTherapee (despite being powered by Qt and looking pretty barren) in fact works more reliably with no such issues, and it’s also cross-platform software that is free to boot.
I don't mean to claim that the mentioned issues are unavoidable or that some piece of software is more likely than not to have these issues, just that when there are OS-specific issues it's this kind of thing I expect. Clipboard handling is pretty much an entirely different implementation on each platform unless you're using something like Electron that already handles it for you, for instance.
Meanwhile, open-source, non-Electron, multi-platform software that handles copy-paste via system clipboard exists just fine (VCV Rack comes to mind).
You can find a Darktable teacher, and I did. He is a professional photographer, but I disagree with that particular teacher's style in photography - especially the rejection of strong edits even if they do work as creative reinterpretations of the scene.
You can find a photography teacher with good taste in composition, with recognition that both ultra-constrained and creative edits have their place (and I did find such a teacher), but that teacher will inevitably use Lightroom. That teacher recognizes what needs to be edited, recognizes that Darktable has the right to exist, but will explain the needed changes using Lightroom tool names.
It's now your job to translate - and, importantly, translate the visual effect achieved, not the slider name. This requires seeing the intended effect. This requires doing it in Lightroom first and then trying to make Darktable output look the same.
For example, the teacher asked for a high-key edit and told me to raise the whites. In Lightroom, this keeps contrast high near the top of the tonal range, right until it abruptly becomes zero because of clipping. That "high contrast followed by clipping" behavior is exactly what the requested high-key edit needed.
But your teacher will never describe it in those contrast-related terms. Before translating the instruction into Darktable, you first have to discover the visual pattern yourself that the Lightroom slider is producing.
And the correct translation, if you use the "sigmoid" tonemapper, is the "target white" control, which the official documentation marks as "don’t touch". You need to set it to 130% via right-clicking to override the soft limit of 100%. Very non-obvious, not mentioned in the Darktable course that I went through, but the photography teacher then accepted the edit.
In summary, the requirement to learn Lightroom in advance just to understand the photography teacher is the real trap here.
Curves (in the form of Tone Equalizer and the old display-oriented Curve) do exist in Darktable, as well as parametric, drawn, external, and, since 5.6, AI masks.
It's more like finding the subscription for a CAD program too expensive, and swapping to something more primitive instead. If that offends you, I think you gotta have a long hard look in a mirror some time.
FastRawViewer, DxO, Affinity, Darktable, Capture One. Those are just the ones I personally have installed. There's also RawTherapee, a number of camera OEM-specific tools, and more.
If Capture One still is like this, I wouldn't really be surprised if there's truth to the other comment here claiming that their current owners are trying to offload them.
Please recommend these "powerful alternatives", because I have explored the space and found nothing that replaces Lightroom in a way that I find acceptable. Please omit Darktable and Rawtherapee as I've already evaluated those.
In their defense you only spoke about dropping your raw workflow for something simpler not that you looked for a special HDR RAW support.
I know it’s Apple and may not what you look for but does Photomator tick these boxes?
This is the new version of "GIMP is better than Photoshop", it seems.
And I'm sure this will all change when the new vulture capital fund that snaps it up tries to extract every last microcent of "value" from the brand.
I should also note I jumped ship to DxO as soon as C1 started going down the subscription hole. And frankly, I'm kind of glad they're struggling. I guess they thought they were going to replicate Adobe's "success" with subscriptions without first being a near-monopoly.
You speak in theory that geeks and enthusiastic photographers like talk about. Pro photographers don't care, they need results.
And here is another problem: very weak default look. This is a problem because the default unedited look is the basis of further editing decisions, and the photographer is lured into thinking that the photo is supposed to look desaturated and with open shadows. I repeatedly got the same critique, "why did you decide to kill the contrast and color saturation that was present in your RAW file?" I didn't kill them. I didn't even know they existed. And now I made a change to my workflow (a preset) to compensate, but this should not have been necessary.
There are many things it makes sense to copy/drag-drop between applications. There are cases where you might not need to, but using the system clipboard is still common.
> Meanwhile, open-source, non-Electron, multi-platform software that handles copy-paste via system clipboard exists just fine (VCV Rack comes to mind)
VCV Rack seems to just use GLFW to handle it, but again I'm not claiming these issues are unavoidable or more likely than not to occur. For any given issue with some software, 99% of other software will not have that same issue.
They're sufficient in many cases, but you'll still sometimes need the control of working with COM/etc. directly, and those libraries don't fully save you from platform-specific bugs (e.g: https://github.com/glfw/glfw/issues/2644).
> the app in question has no use for system clipboard in the first place
What do you expect to happen when you copy some text from an external editor into a text field?
I wasn't looking for RAW hdr, just plain jane RAW support that handles moderately new cameras. I stayed on with the old Lightroom as long as I could, but a) it didn't handle my new Sony RAW files, and b) new Mac versions made it impossible to run.
I've moved away from Apple, as that was the last thing tying me to it. Photomator might be nice actually, maybe a good reason to dust off the iPad - cheers.
...
Edit: mobile editing has come a long way since I last checked. Photomator seems really great - between this and a desktop-first approach (Darktable / Davinci) I think this solves all my needs. Big thanks for the recommendation.
I need to do the jump myself to something better. The last update of Lightroom classic runs so damn slow on my Mac mini (M4). Was super annoyed yesterday while working on some pictures.
A hybrid clipboard system is possible, but adds complexity and won't necessarily eliminate platform-specific bugs.
> No app needs to worry about copying text between text fields, system APIs take care of that
Platform-specific APIs that need to be called using platform-specific implementations, and thus are a reasonable cause of platform-specific bugs.