For all the potshots about AI, this update is huge even if you take away the AI features. They basically added lightroom to this release. There's some polish before you'd want to change your subscription, but its really tempting. It may be the best photo management/editor on linux. Yes, I know about darktable and rawtherapee and I stand by what I said. They also added a ton of motion graphics stuff which from the beta seem to be enough to undercut a lot of basic uses of after effects out. The later two features are in the free release as well!
> ...before you'd want to change your subscription...
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's a bit convoluted to get to but you can also "rent" a license for $30 a month through Blackmagic Cloud. As with many, I'm not a fan of subscription licenses but it was valuable for me to use for a month to evaluate if the Studio features warranted the investment in the permanent license. Specifically some of the Fusion effects are Studio only.
I was a lightroom user for almost 20 years, and their licensing ridiculousness was enough for me to: - change up my workflow, avoiding raw so I can use simpler editing processes - do way less editing - take way fewer photos
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.
I made the switch from premier to resolve a few years ago and it feels like such a breath of fresh air. Being able to do the same with Lightroom would be amazing so can't wait to check this out. I've been using the free version and honestly never needed the pro features but I think I'll make the one time purchase today just to support a non-subscription based product of this caliber
I have both the latest Lightroom and Davinci Resolve.
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.
Is the Lightroom stuff the same as was discussed on HN a couple months ago? If so, then, see also 296 comments about the new photo mode: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47760529
It is. That was for the beta
I run a photography biz on the side, and this is huge tbh.
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 was not aware that we could edit photos in DaVinci Resolve in Linux. Thank you for this info, I'll certainly give it a try!
Output size is limited to 4K in the free version, I think. Which is not nothing (8MP or something, good for a reasonably large print) but it might make you question how much editing belongs inside Resolve.
You couldn't until this release. :-P
I haven't had a chance to look at the non-beta version but in the 21 Beta, the Photo page didn't support Lumix or Olympus raw formats, and I own two cameras: a Lumix and an Olympus. :-(
I assumed they would add them later, I hope I'm right!
edit: nope, still only supports Canon, Fuji, Nikon, Sony and iPhone ProRAW.
They mentioned in notes the support will come. They support lumix videos.
Can you run batch processing with the same settings over a large sequence of images like in Lightroom as well? And/or make slight changes to some parameters at certain points of time like correcting light intensity during sunsets the transitions smooths when your hardware made a step change when capturing it?
You can. Davinci is more powerful for this too because you can copy the parts of the node tree. So you can have a base edit for exposure, white balance etc then apply your look as a copy paste on top of the clean part. In Lightroom and most photocentric workflows you get one prebaked pipeline.
I haven't tried these new image features at all, nor do I know how well exposed it is in the scripting API in the new version, but Resolve does have a Scripting API I've used for batch processing (of videos) in the past, I'm guessing this gist will soon be updated for version 21 then you can take a peek there: https://gist.github.com/X-Raym/2f2bf453fc481b9cca624d7ca0e19...
Unfortunately they are far from Lightroom, maybe next year they'll be closer. I really would like to ditch Lightroom but there is no alternative
Laat time I checked, deleting an image on DaVinci didn’t delete on disk. That’s something I’m really missing
It might be best editor on linux but running it on linux is not easy. You basically need pick correct hardware pick right distro. It might be pretty easy on the oficial rocky linux but on other distros good luck. Also no AMD support.
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.
I suspect main reason resolve supports linux is render farms with purposefully bought hw.
There install script is quite aggressive as well. Well at least around ~v16 it was.
Also, nobody would have complained about "content aware face fill", "AI" image edition tools have been standard for ten years in Photoshop
I remember CS2 making big news with the "healing brush", that's like 20 years ago or something like that.
That wasn’t an AI tool at all, though. Neither is pre-2023 content-aware fill, AFAIK.
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)
Probably not you, but on this very forum there are plenty who will argue that LLMs / AI are entirely deterministic and that given enough time, a chisel, and sufficient clay tablets, any AI output can be calculated by hand.
I don’t know enough about anything to determine which opinion is correct.
Is AI output not just matrix multiplication and a random seed?
I don't disagree necessarily on the fundamentals; I am slowly catching up on what LLMs do and don't do but that sounds right to me.
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)
> 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.
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.
In my mind, it's as much "AI" as "AI Slate ID" introduced in this release, which I guess was kind of the point of what GP said.
Is there any RAW processing software for Linux that works for DJI drone photos?
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.
Resolve runs on Linux. What am I missing?
Resolve unfortunately only supports a few brands of raw. Om systems is not supported for instance.
>They also added a ton of motion graphics stuff which from the beta seem to be enough to undercut a lot of basic uses of after effects out.
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
This has not been my experience. I have frequent crashes with Fusion that seem to be related to specific nodes. Checking my computers usage it doesn't seem like I'm running out of juice either.
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.
That’s interesting, our experience with fusion has been fantastic. But maybe you’re doing certain kind of work or more advanced work than we are
> For all the potshots about AI,
Most video is going to be AI in the near future. They see the writing on the wall. Their camera business line is going to sharply decline.
> Most video is going to be AI in the near future
That's like saying all fine art would be photography, all film would be CGI, or all music would be synthesized electronica.
That's not how aesthetics seem to work. Artists will make more or less good use of generative AI in their work, and it will probably seep into most media in some way or another, effecting them, but arts mostly don't get replaced and AI doesn't really offer an exception to that history.
> That's like saying all fine art would be photography
Or is it like saying most portraits will be photographs rather than paintings? There are still a lot of portraits painted (maybe even as many as the pre-camera days), but by raw numbers most portraits are created by photographers.
There will also be a longer or shorter period of time in which such technology will be abused by artists (because it's new) and at some point it will stabilize.
It's saying most art will be created with AI.
Like saying most pictures will be made with digital cameras.
Like saying most music will be captured and edited digitally.
You guys have an anti-AI bug and it's eating you alive and blinding you to the future that is unfolding. It's toxic and you're all 100% wrong. Your hate makes it impossible to see all of the improvements.
I've been a filmmaker for decades. This tech is the most amazing thing I've ever witnessed. And it's just getting started.
Stop being old men yelling at clouds. If you don't like it, you can continue doing things the way you're used to.
It isn't like saying any of those things because they are referring to recording media and not to a pipe dream invented by tech bros to attract investors so that their deeply-in-the-red company can stay afloat a little while longer. AI can't create anything.
It isn't like saying any of those things because they are referring to recording media and not to a pipe dream invented by tech bros to attract investors so that their deeply-in-the-red company can stay afloat a little while longer. AI can't create anything.
How do you know you aren't arguing with one now?
Aren’t the cameras they are making aimed at professional productions? Those are probably going to replaced last, the first thing will be (or are) TikTok clips shot on smartphones.
I don’t think they’ll see a decline in cinema camera sales due to AI soon.
Yeah they don't make a single consumer grade product. Prosumer at its lowest, and even then they're way too technical for the uninitiated. No one is picking up a BMPCC and just shooting/posting online.
I doubt it because I wouldn't waste my time watching it and I can't imagine all that many people today that don't already watch AI videos are going to suddenly change their mind and decide they like AI produced Hallmark movies.
"AI makes real world obsolete." I think that's enough hacker news for today.
Why do you believe this? Are you expecting all media to become fully AI - sports, TV, movies, youtube?
They've been spamming slop project submissions the last few months. But then again, who isn't?
No way.
Even the frontier models running on insanely powerful hardware could only generate 15 second clips in low resolutions.
And yeah, I saw some demos from Seedance 2.0, and they were awful. It's ridiculous how much people on Xitter were like "You can't even tell it's AI!" and I was like "It's trivial to tell it's AI" and could easily pick out all the markers. An individual screenshot could look good, but every time the camera angle changed, there would be a glaring inconsistency.
You people are either blind, delusional, or outright insane. AI might be used for a quick clip, or used to enhance something recorded by a camera, but "most video" is definitely wrong.
God I hope not. That’s depressing.
Even more reason to check out.
So live A/V is just dead now? Movies are dead? I really don't get where this take is coming from.
You are only looking at your own consumption at the moment. There are a lot of problems that still need to be fixed especially with rope artifacting. The 4k most models taunt isn't equivalent to a real 4k image or video as well at the moment you need a quality factor of two to get the equivalent result of a shot image or video. Resolution does not indicate quality.