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.

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.

>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.

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.

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

Photo shoots for automotive advertising regularly are around that pricepoint.

> 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.

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.

> 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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.