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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I assumed they would add them later, I hope I'm right!
edit: nope, still only supports Canon, Fuji, Nikon, Sony and iPhone ProRAW.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's already a bit of a fatigue with CGI and the "flat lighting" Netflix TV style. AI is just going to make that worse. Mind you, I'm old enough that I would call any movie where more than 50% of the frame for more than 50% of the runtime was never real objects and created entirely on computer "animation". It's a subtly different discipline.
But yes, there's going to be a lot of it, and it's going to rack up a lot of Netflix watch hours, in the same way that "4k crackling fireplace" does.
Individuals are now making eight-minute movies with AI that are definitely wandering across the line of “watchable” into “entertaining”:
How do you know you aren't arguing with one now?
For the moment what is unfolding is a dystopia shoved down most people's throats, whether they want it or not.
And the bug is obviously the "AI bug", a foreign body recently introduced. The "bug" can't be our default previous state (no AI).
>I've been a filmmaker for decades. This tech is the most amazing thing I've ever witnessed. And it's just getting started
Hopefully it will be over soon.
>Stop being old men yelling at clouds
You know that the leading AI providers and experts in the field often discuss how AI can/might/surely will wipe us off? Not some random guys with signs in some street corner. The main people behind it.
Now, I don't believe it's so, at least not for the reasons mentioned, like the singularity. But there are very dark results from AI in society and in many domains.
But hey, we can make pretty uncanny valley (for now) videos and special effects! No need to involve or employ humans in our art either. And the human art can be drowned in a sea of AI crap, so noone will really see our AI art either. Such amazing tech /s
I don’t think they’ll see a decline in cinema camera sales due to AI soon.
Happy to bet on this!
Expensive glass and all of the processes around it takes more time, money, and resources than Seedance 2.0. And these models are only a few years old at this point.
Sure, but the results will also seem better to a cinematographer.
When do you expect the first movie with fully 3D-generated imagery (which would mean that a camera was actually replaced by AI) will be released?
I can imagine it will happen at some point, but I don't see it soon.
Actually what ruins camera businesses are smartphones, not AI.
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.
I'm an indie filmmaker and I do community theater. We use gaussian splats for 3D filmmaking, and we're already using AI for background plates and VFX shots.
Where this is going - your local community theater will be able to have Lord of the Rings / Gollum-style facial/body rigs that eventually work in real time, and actors will markerless mocap into super high fidelity fantasy and science fiction scenes.
> Movies are dead? I really don't get where this take is coming from.
Movies will never be more real and more personal. The folks at A24 are going to have Marvel powers with way better stories.
Stop being so bearish. These are tools, and creative people will abuse the hell out of them to do wildly cool things.
Good luck on your journey as a filmmaker (truly not being sarcastic), I’ve been in the industry for 15 years so we are colleagues here who can have a dialogue.