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Comment by jayphen | Hacker News Reader

I actually downloaded this and tried it. Am I the first one here to do that?

As someone who hasn't touched DaVinci products before (but a lot of experience with LR) - I am immediately confused by the integration of photo editing here. It feels very much like video editing software with photo editing tacked on. I can imagine that this would be much more intuitive for people who are already used to using DaVinci for video editing.

I can intuit from the interface that there are a lot of powerful editing opportunities here, but I feel lost in the software. I spent 15 minutes or so trying to figure out how to do simple masking, but I could not find any way to do it for photos.

Obviously this is just a beta and hopefully the workflow will be improved, but unless the photo editing features are extracted in to their own software package, I don't think it's enough yet to sway me from LR (and I want so desperately to be swayed)

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You're not the first :)

If you know how to do masking with video in Davinci, then it all just applies to photos too. I tried today some basic Magic Mask and color tab editing with photos, and it works exactly the same (without the annoying waiting time on huge videos for Magic Mask, ofc).

I've just now had a look at a couple of YouTube tutorials on Magic Mask for video and I think I understand where I got lost. It looks like the tools I was looking for are on the Color tab, and I first need to drag my images in to the timeline at the bottom of the screen and then jump to the Color tab to work with them.

All the tools are here for a good photo editing product - they just need to be extracted and arranged in a way that is intuitive for photo editing, and this would be a legitimate LR alternative.

edit: This is a great video on the Photo tools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuKgfytA0lg. I do feel a little more confident that I could use Resolve for editing after watching this.

Yeah, it's questionable that Davinci layout will yield a good photo experience, but it's interesting development anyway. BTW, that's the reason I like Photomator - it has absolute minimum of what I typically would use, and it's all there. Like, there is a hotkey for autoaligning horizont (and quite often it actually work), or intuitive AI-powered 'Select subject'/'Select background', and even an easy way to back those typical change into edit that can be applied with a hotkey onto a bunch of photos. It's easy to spot when software was written based on pain points of real end users.

Is it only in the Studio version? Or the 21 Beta release? I downloaded the free version of Resolve 20 and I don't see any evidence that I can edit my raw nikon photos. The "Color" tab looks like it could be helpful if I knew how to turn my images in the media pool into "stills"

It's in the free 21 Beta version.

> It feels very much like video editing software with photo editing tacked on.

Isn't it exactly what it is?

Yes, but I think it's important to make that clear. It doesn't appear to attempt to target photographers who are not coming from a video editing background, and photographers will probably be disappointed.

I do hope they split this out to a separate focused product, as the photo editing space is in dire need of more options.

The webpage seems to advertise itself as a Lightroom replacement sort of software?

Which if it is, it better be damn good at it. Adobe may generally suck and Lightroom has many rough edges, but it has streamlined its workflow very well.

This is why I (photographer) haven't switched from Lightroom to an alternative. It's because all the alternatives are targetting different workflows or have a pretty half-assed RAW workflow. We don't need a photo workflow tacked on to something else, we need a proper good workflow made from scratch.

Isn't this aimed at people already using Resolve for video work who want to do still images too?

It is unclear. Their marketing material at least does imply that they are targeting photographers:

> Whether you’re a professional colorist looking to apply your skills to fashion shoots and weddings, or a photographer who wants to work beyond the limits of traditional photo applications, the Photo page unlocks the tools you need

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