[arecsu]

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, parametric masks, tone equalizer, etc), while rest of "industry standard" software lagged behind for quite so long, stagnant. Even more so when it comes to "creative" ways of editing, which Video Editing software have adopted for years but photo editors didn't (relight, actual LUT usage without complications, film emulation, halation, other aesthetic effects like VHS film damage, etc).

There's so much we can do. To me, it seems like these sort of conservative culture (photography) vs progressive (video editing). I've been into both worlds, and for some reason video editing software and professionals were much eager to try new stuff and celebrate new ways to shape visuals, compared to photographers.

[gyomu]

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 working in video has a solid understanding of the technical underpinnings of their craft. On the other hand, it’s not uncommon for working photographers to not understand some really basic stuff about color science/data formats/etc.

[dbspin]

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.

[PaulHoule]

As a semi-pro photographer I look at the $295 pricing and think that is a very reasonable price for something that could help my photos look like my photos. I bought DxO PhotoLab for $235 and color grade with it all the time. Right now I use LUTs that other people made and have been thinking I’d like to learn to be more systematic and make my own.

I don’t really do video but I have in the past so a video editor coming in a box sweetens the deal in the same sense that Adobe CC comes with, say, Premiere, which I use just occasionally. I can totally shoot video with my Sony and there is definitely a lot of demand for it on the internet these days. I also know Divinchi resolve is a product that many people in film/video are enthusiastic for and that counts too.

[omgitsu]

The amazing thing about Resolve is that the free version is almost certainly enough for > 95% of use cases. The features that are locked behind the Studio upgrade are truly pro features - in that you won’t need them at all unless you are delivering for a proper studio or professional project. The amount of firepower you get from the free version is easily at parity with any comparable product from Adobe/Apple - and in many cases blows them out of the water… for free.

[ryukoposting]

(and it supports Linux)

[doubletwoyou]

Theoretically..

IIRC, it only officially supports CentOS or some other baroque thing, doesn’t support importing or exporting mp4 when free, and also (unrelated to the product itself) Linux hw accel of video is flakey.

[eitally]

I'm also a semi-pro (technically I'm a pro but it's just a side gig) photographer who uses DxO. I really like DxO for color & exposure, as well as denoise, but I've gotten supremely frustrated at it's lack of more sophisticated editing functionality. I'm increasingly considering an Adobe subscription just to have something with more effective AI masking -- DxO stinks for this -- not to mention small things like generative fill to simplify stuff like powerline removal.

[KaiserPro]

THe cinema industry is much smaller than photography, but the dialogue between companies and customers is much much richer in VFX.

Autodesk, foundry and Avid all have site licenses with their big players, and the product owners/managers will be on site talking to users to see what bugs/features are needed.

More over a lot of the big companies that buy this software also have their own R&D departments. So there is much cross pollination.

Also people will come to blackmagic and foundry with problems and ask for help (Ie rolling shutter reduction, anti-noise, optical flow, copy grade, etc etc)

[user_7832]

> Source - I'm a videographer that also works as a cinematographer / director on smaller budget projects.

Tangential - any helpful advice you could give to budding videographers? I'd love to make those nice B-roll images you see in YouTube videos (Engineering Explained comes to mind).

Most advice is either for folks videoing people, or generally for photography. Funny thing is I'd say I'm already a very solid photographer... but my videos (admittedly shot on my phone) never look as good.

[dbspin]

Sure. It's a very broad question but...

Learn to shoot static first. Biggest mistake I see people make when they move from photo to video is moving the camera without intention. Master the basic size of shots - wide, mid, closeup - with a variety of stills lenses on a tripod (or in hand with good in camera stabalisation).

Then learn the basic moves - ped, pan, track etc. If you're moving, think about how you're stabalising your camera - gimbal, shoulder rig etc. Most DSLR's do not have good enough stablisation to allow movement without artifacts.

Make sure you understand your camera. For photos you have much more leeway in post. For video I'd recommend always shooting at the camera's native ISO, at 24/25/30 shutter speed, and keeping shutter angle at double the shutter speed (or 180 degrees).

Don't change settings during a shot (other than focus). Set everything to manual, get your ISO, white balance, shutter speed or angle right, and leave it at that for the duration of the shot. If the lighting changes in the shot, your settings should cover the whole extent of the lighting for that shot.

Think about each shot as an image. i.e.: Don't try to catch everything, but focus on a detail, or framing, just as you would with a photo. If you're filming people, how they sit in the frame in relation to the background and other people (how large they are in frame, how they're blocked, whether they're enclosed by foreground detail etc) determines how we see them.

Just focus on all the basic photography stuff - rule of thirds, colour theory, bokeh etc. People just get overwhelmed when they switch to video, but the same rules apply. It's really just moving photographs after all.

Movement is in time, think about a nice frame of a railway line in a landscape - then a train enters and passes through it. Movement is everywhere - water, reflections, shadows, animals. Find a strong frame in nature or the build environment, that has movement, or will have movement passing through it and shoot that.

Then start thinking about how shots connect together. Even B-Roll tells a story and has a rhythm. Wide to closeup, big object to small object, matching motion between shots, directing the viewers eye as it moves across the frame. You're always telling a story, so when you get 'coverage' try to have the story you'll tell in the edit in mind. If you're capturing a place, whats a wide or ultra wide that gives us an emotional impression of the place. What are some details that colour it in. Whats a change thats occurring that ads movement life and purpose.

Basically it's about intentionality and choice. Whats the feeling you're trying to convey and which shots convey it best. A good exercise is trying to shoot a happy event in a threatening or disturbing style, or vice versa. Here's an example where I shot and edited a St Patrick's day parade in a nightmarish style - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpj-fK8obPI

Think in terms of the final video or film rather than individual shots. That's the equivalent of the finished photo.

[motoxpro]

100% agree. Photo is a much muuuch bigger market.

[Melatonic]

From what I remember colourists are not using Nuke (more compositing)

[dbspin]

Steve Yedlin uses Nuke exclusively for grading. AFAIK lots of high end cinematographers and colourists do. I'm a DaVinci man myself, nuke is intimidating.

[mastermage]

Counterpoint most of the Movies budgets is usualy spent on the actors and on the filming. Not on the editing team. There is also copious amounts of money in photography Alot of advertising is still static images and print.

[atoav]

Yes, but if the budget of the whole thing is high(er) they don't tend to cheap out on details that could mske or break it.

Or phrased differently: If your shoot codts a million a day it doesn't matter if your camera costs 400 bucks a day or 40. In fact they may ask you whether you really wanna go with the 40-buck camera.

[mastermage]

> Yes, but if the budget of the whole thing is high(er) they don't tend to cheap out on details that could mske or break it.

The evidence does not point to this. There have been copious amounts of movies that hired the Rock and then made the worst CGI in the history of Cinema.

[hobofan]

> Meanwhile, $1M would be an insane budget for a photo shoot.

Photo shoots for automotive advertising regularly are around that pricepoint.

[d3vnull]

But there's a couple orders of magnitude more photo shoots than movies and since once you write software once, you can copy it for free, investing in creating photo editing software still makes sense.

[coldtea]

>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.

Movies are not where BlackMagic makes their money. It's from the millions and millions of small videographers, news teams, ad teams, and content creators.

Same for photos.

[dylan604]

> Anyone working in video has a solid understanding of the technical underpinnings of their craft.

Lol. That's the funniest thing I've read in a long time. I've been on so many sets where there was not a single person that knew how to read a waveform. After the Canon 5Dmkii came out where "the producer's nephew could shoot this for $500" became a thing, the skill set dropped dramatically. There are people that can frame a pretty picture while at the same time have zero understanding of what's happening between the lens and the sensor to the recording medium. When video cameras started shooting flat expecting the user to know what to do with that, it became a trend of sending the flat look out because people didn't know what to do with it. When DV cameras were shooting 24 but still recording to tape with pulldown applied so it still recorded to a 29.97 tape, people had no idea how to get rid of the interlacing properly and just edited 29.97 instead of the 24/23.976.

You are giving way too much credit to people in the industry. It would be nice if everyone on the production crew and in post knew everything they should to be competent, but there are many many people fakin' it 'til they make it.

[traceroute66]

> The short of it is that there’s no money in photography

Oh dear...

I'd better go tell all the gear manufacturers, especially the higher-end kit like PhaseOne cameras and the Profoto flashes. Guess I should also tell the pro departments of Canon and Nikon they no longer have a job either.

There's TONS of money washing around photography.

From the wedding and sports photographers, to the paparazzi to the household-name fashion / landscape /architectural photographers.

There's then all the semi-pros and the amateurs with deep pockets.

Most of them will spend more money on insurance ALONE than the $295 asking price of DaVinci Resolve - Photo.

Hell, most of them will already have an Adobe subscription that they won't be cancelling any time soon. :)

[Keyframe]

those big productions are production design and above the line heavy. Most people on shoots are paid well. However, if you look at the other side of the coin, hardware and software supporting the industry, it's actually "laughable". ARRI which is the biggest name in the game on shoots is ~$1b, RED was sold of for $85m, BMD could fetch as high as $3b, Autodesk's Media & Entertainment is <%5 of its revenue which would, if it were standalone, also bring it to around $1b valuation. Avid the same at ~$1.5, Grass Valley the same ~$1b-1.5, Sony's ET&S is hard to gauge since it includes everything, but an estimate is ~$1.5b, Maxon ~$1.5, all of Nikon $4b, Canon's camera division ~$15b...

and then you have Adobe which has ~%65 of its revenue coming from Creative segment ($14-15b over $23.77 for 2025), which would put it at ~$70b - $100b valuation if it were standalone (5x-7x revenue).

That's how big Adobe is compared to literally everything else. Its creative division is 3x-4x more than the entire industry combined.

You do have new contenders now with Epic (~$22b), Canva ($26b), Figma ($20b), but I'm not convinced.. in certain segments for sure, but still not confident based on stock performance or revenue.

[Forgeties79]

Adobe may be a big dog but it hasn’t insulated them from black magic eating more and more of their NLE market share with every passing year. BMD went from making a (niche for everyone else) Hollywood color tool to a full blown NLE with almost 20% of the market share in less than a decade. Not to mention a very respectable camera line.

I remember hearing the phrase “round tripping through resolve” for years as some sort of magical incantation only somebody in post production understood. Now resolve is fighting for Lightroom’s space within a full NLE. That’s something!

[Keyframe]

Yeah, BMD has a fighting chance. It's interesting how they got there (software-wise). They bought cutting-edge and expensive tools and kind of gave them away for free-ish. Hardware sales gave them a chest to do it with, and small market for those niche tools allowed them to buy it for peanuts. It's Autodesk's playbook on M&A but definitely different strategy in capturing the market.

Even Apple had a horse in the race with Color, but once Resolve became free or ridiculously cheap it was game over.. even for more advanced tools like Lustre (which merged into Flame), Film Light, Base Light, Scratch, etc. More than I can count which died even before that.

Turns out if you can afford to give your tool to wide audience with no budget, that's what they'll use (especially if it's any good) and will end up turning to you eventually for more professional setups once / if they get into pro waters.

[Forgeties79]

They’ve definitely played the long game well

[esperent]

> 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 science from working in 3d graphics so it's not that I'm lacking there. I guess it's like blender of yore. It could become mainstream but it would require a full UI overhaul and in the meantime it's for experts only, or determined people with a lot more time on their hands than I have.

[omnimus]

There is even Darktable fork Ansel where they try to roll back lot of these ux mishaps.

Once you care only about editing and not cataloging then RawTherapee ends up being better editor for mr.

[mikae1]

> There is even Darktable fork Ansel where they try to roll back lot of these ux mishaps.

AFAIK, the reasons Ansel exists are:

1. To yank out darktable internals for code purity reasons.

2. Its (talented) developer worked better by himself than in group.

He was vehemently opposed to any idea containing the words "intuitive" or "UX".

[omnimus]

You are right. I don't know really. I thought that because i find Ansel a bit easier to operate.

[Maxion]

Yeah, the UI in darktable is not good enough to go through a large shoot. When I've tried to use it I always end up doing all my selection in PhotoMechanic and then in darktable I just do editing. But even that UI/UX is terrible.

[FireBeyond]

PM's performance on Mac has gone through the floor, to me. It shouldn't take 8 seconds to quit on a M2 Ultra. Raw rendering is slow too. I ended up moving to FastRawViewer.

[pontussw]

I did the same journey, felt quite tragic after so many years in PM but FastRawViewer has been brilliant for me - highly recommend

[tomaskafka]

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.

[unmole]

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

[embedding-shape]

Still, Blender and 3ds Max are pretty much on two different ends of some spectrum, not sure which yet, but they seems to more or less follow two very different axioms when it comes to UI and UX philosophy. I've spent most of my 3D-ing time in 3ds Max, but Blender is more intuitive to me, but I also know others in the same position favoring 3ds Max.

[bombcar]

Something can be intuitive to new users and yet a complete mystery to a pro experienced with a different UI paradigm.

[CyberDildonics]

It really is bizarre. It's like a dive bar that has the bathroom doors as men's on one door with an arrow pointing right and women's on the right with an arrow pointing left. It's a case study in how not to design a UI.

[jiggawatts]

> 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 ton of money on SDI cards for no good reason.

Sure, they fixed that now, but the pedigree of "we're a hardware company first, software company second" remains. They're not a photo editing company and have no idea what makes Lightroom "the" industry standard.

> conservative culture (photography) vs progressive (video editing)

I've found the exact opposite to be true!

Lightroom has used "scene referred" (correct) color management since forever. 32-bit float ultra-wide-gamut HDR throughout. This is a "new" feature in Resolve! [1]

Similarly, I just tried Resolve 21 photo export and it exports... SDR. Probably in sRGB, who knows? Appears to be totally uncalibrated.

Meanwhile Lightroom can export 16-bit PNGs, wide-gamut, true HDR, HDR gain maps, JPEG XL, etc, etc.

Resolve is way behind on the basics.

[1] There are excuses for this, mostly to do with performance when editing real-time footage vs a still image.

[user34283]

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.

[jiggawatts]

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

[porphyra]

Darktable is great, but notably, it doesn't have any neural network-based denoising, even though that's now standard in Lightroom, Capture One, and other apps. Darktable only has rather outdated wavelet and non-local means denoising. So a photo that would be perfectly fine at ISO 6400 in other apps will still look grainy, or worse, splotchy in Darktable.

[patrakov]

To give DarkTable credit, neural-network-based denoising will be in the next major release (5.6).

And even without neural networks, DarkTable denoising is better than open-source competitors, due to the database of camera sensor noise shipped with it. For each supported camera and ISO setting, it contains the measured values of Poissonian and Gaussian components of the sensor noise, so proper denoising becomes a one-click operation. That's as opposed to the much more complicated "drag the luminance and chrominance noise sliders until the noise disappears, then drag two more sliders to recover detail" workflow found, e.g., in ART.

[trop]

Darktable has a "neural restore" algorithm [0] in the development version (intended for midsummer release). Note:

- It appears to be an out-of-band pre-processing stage (run the image through denoise to produce an intermediary TIFF), unlike most other parts of the program.

- All AI features are gated behind compile-time flags which default to off.

[0] https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/20523

[porphyra]

Wow, that's great news!

[sergimansilla]

As a Capture One user, I wish Capture One had NN denoising. It is one area in which it can’t touch Lightroom.

[vasco]

I know you have a whole narrative going but there's gotta be millions of "make my picture look analog" filters, that was the whole premise of Instagram, you can get specific effects for pictures to look like all kinds of specific cameras, so mentioning VHS like esthetics as something that doesn't exist is very strange.

[prmoustache]

But that was a fad with the purpose of tentatively hiding the poor quality of the photos taken using smartphones of that era.

Nowadays default filtering is that everybody crank saturation and vibrance way too high so that it looks good when looked on a small screen full of fingerprints and a scratched screen protectors, under the sunlight. Same way music is dynamically overcompressed because the baseline is it need to still sound half decent on hostile noisy environments with crappy speakers/headphone.

[buildbot]

An instagram filter is to a 3D lut as a PB&J sandwich is to a Michelin star meal...

Let alone the other things listed.

[vasco]

I'm saying the things mentioned exist and gave example of one of the most popular consumer applications in the whole world already offering an entry level version of the same feature. Since that's what most people know about.

You have all those features already in professional photo software already as well. DaVinci is cool but it doesn't unlock anything like "make my photo look like VHS" that hasn't existed for decades by now.

[TeMPOraL]

Is there even a working definition of what a "filter" is in Instagram, or mobile photo editors targetting social media users (which is approximately all of the mobile photo editors), beyond "a script that fucks up your photo in some trivial but also undocumented ways"?

I'm yet to see a filter that makes your photo look like taken from a specific camera (old or otherwise). Smearing colors and sticking a frame that imitates camera film border does not count.

[vasco]

Read this https://www.christopherroosen.com/blog/2019/11/10/how-imperf...

I cant find the original source of why I know this but I know the original Instagram filters were trying to emulate specific looks from specific analog cameras and expired film.

Smearing colors for example or weird blue / purple overlays is what you get when you shoot expired film.

[buildbot]

There’s literally no concrete details in this; other than that they were inspired by the lomo cameras… Do you know what a 3D LUT is? Or color grading at all?

[harrall]

I disagree — photography has always been ripe with significant digital alteration of photos.

The main issue is that Adobe has been a long time player in the market and they have historically segmented into 4 distinct types of tools: RAW editing (Lightroom), raster editing (Photoshop), vector (Illustrator), and video editing (Premiere). Adobe still dominates in the first 3 categories.

Achieving the effects you listed would just happen in Photoshop, and Adobe never cross contaminates their product lines with the same features. You’d need to buy both Lightroom ($12/mo) and Photoshop to do what you want ($20/mo). Want vector editing? $40/mo now. Creative subscriptions are good money to them.

You’ll see other companies try to break this segmentation — for example, Affinity combined several categories of tools into one, but when they first released their suite, they actually followed Adobe’s model.

[Melatonic]

Photoshop has camera raw which is literally what Lightroom is built on - it's basically just a reskin of ACR with cataloguing and other features.

After Effects is also huge

[connorelsea]

I've been really pleased with Luminar Neo for photo editing and have been using it alongside Lightroom. Their marketing unfortunately makes it seem like an unserious and gimmicky tool for non-professionals, just due to extreme AI focus and SaaS-ificiation of their website, but it's actually really good software. The core editing tools are on par with Lightroom and have very friendly UX, and some (not all) of the near-gimmick AI features are actually impressive and forward-thinking.

[qingcharles]

I also use Neo set up as a plugin to Photoshop. This has been my pro setup for like 3 years now. I couldn't do without Neo, it makes some tasks so much quicker than any of the other options.

[alfanick]

While Darktable has a lot of nice niche features, from UX point of view it’s 20 years behind any of commercial offerings. If GIMP is like open source Photoshop, then Darktable is like open source Lightroom - both GIMP and Darktable are absolutely crap when it comes to UX, unless you mastered them for 10 years. Darktable should focus on some UX/UI GSOC-like project and figure out their usability to be considered useful.

[afarviral]

I'm some ways I'd argue the UI of darktable is ahead of its time and fairly snazzy. It's just a much more sophisticated tool. What is one thing about the UI that specifically feels dated? Burried maybe, but dated?

[orbital-decay]

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.

[DrewADesign]

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.

[discopicante]

I think this has been imprinted in the photographer world due to long-standing requirements from AP, Reuters, etc. on avoiding post-processing. Video has never had these constraints; post-processing is required to publish the works.

[tablatom]

That’s interesting - how do they define that? Surely they don’t publish raw rgb?

[discopicante]

Reuters banned photos processed from RAW over 10y ago. They will only accept JPEGs from the camera.

https://signalprocessingsociety.org/community-involvement/in...

AP has had these rules since the late 90s:

"Only the established norms of standard photo printing methods such as burning, dodging, black-and-white toning and cropping are acceptable. Retouching is limited to removal of normal scratches and dust spots."

https://niemanreports.org/aps-policy-banning-photo-manipulat...

[bombcar]

As mentioned it's impossible to get "unretouched digital photos" because the camera itself does post-processing - but there were some spicy scandals that arguably were somewhere in the gray area between "move a damn pyramid" and "applying normal lighting techniques" that they resolved with "just use JPEG from the camera".

Of course, we now know that "JPEG from the camera" can be complete bollocks, so it's going to get worse.

https://www.bronxdoc.org/bronx-documentary-center/exhibits/a...

https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...

[Daub]

I teach design and art and routinely supervise photo projects. The low level of expectation that even the best students have of color editing amazes me. Few can think further than brightness/contrast adjustments. Lightroom is seen as the pinnacle yet its hue tools are beyond dreadful. The hue curves in DaVinci are pretty much the only act in town for sophisticated hue adjustments.

[Melatonic]

Adobe products also traditionally have a lot of plugins. Although it's rare for photographers to use scopes for color

[Daub]

> it's rare for photographers to use scopes for color

True, but that is there loss. A scope is a visualization of the color properties of a photo and any problem-solving individual should value visualization highly. I am certain that Rembrandt would have murdered to get his hands of a histogram.

[northernsausage]

As a professional photographer and mostly stills editor I am really excited to get to learn more advanced colour editing using this software, already using it for some video at a novice level. Thankfully I don't get much video work to do but learning the skills on stills is going to really improve my skills in motion. - I'll wait for the reviews but really looking forward to cancelling my adobe sub.

[t0bia_s]

Photoshop can do anything that you mentioned for many years now.

I wish using Darkroom more, but it is terrible in defaults. It's one of those software that is developed by enthusiastic programmers but ignore actual needs of photographers. You don't need tons of demosaic algorithms but none reliable selection tool.

[orbital-decay]

Photoshop itself, without ACR, is light years behind in color processing. It's a dinosaur at this point. It had only one remotely competent grading plugin (Firegrade), but it seems abandoned.

[t0bia_s]

Name some color process that cannot be done in PS. I'm recommending PS for color grading to be precise.

[orbital-decay]

You can do anything in a hex editor. The question is how convenient it is.

[t0bia_s]

Beside Adobe terms of use and implemented spyware, their software is convenient enough to justify monopoly on market.

Sure, editing via prompts or personalised automated actions would be ultimate convenience, but we are not here yet. Day by day software like those from Adobe or BlackMagic will be obsolete.

[t0bia_s]

*not

[laughing_me]

Because their roles differ, their perspectives differ as well. Photographers create value through photography, while post-production professionals create value by giving the work a new perspective.

[CyberDildonics]

Ironically it works very well to edit a photo in a compositing program which black magic also gives away for free in digital fusion. People just don't know about it or how to use it.

[Melatonic]

Interesting - how new is their compositing software ?

[CyberDildonics]

It is many decades old but it was bought by black magic.