Blackmagic Design has announced DaVinci Resolve 21. The biggest innovation is the new Photo page, which brings photo editing to the same environment as color correction for video. This powerful new environment stands in direct competition with Adobe’s Lightroom.
Blackmagic Design has introduced DaVinci Resolve 21. While the new release contains a lot of functionality, the big news is the introduction of the new Photo page. With this, Blackmagic aims to integrate color correction for still images into its existing post-production workflow.
Lightroom alternative
The Photo page is a direct alternative to Adobe Lightroom. With DaVinci as a successful professional alternative to Adobe Premiere, Blackmagic now seems to be setting its sights more on photography.
Blackmagic isn’t making a copy of Lightroom, but is building on the reputation it has already established regarding color correction in video. With DaVinci Resolve 21, the same node-based approach of the Color page carries over to photos, allowing photographers and colorists to work within a single environment for albums, color grades, and effects.
The new Photo page lets users import, organize, and edit their photos within DaVinci Resolve 21. Primary color correction, curves, qualifiers, power windows, and the node editor are all available for still images. Users can combine nodes in series or parallel and apply shared nodes to roll out the same look across an entire album.
Album management
Blackmagic is also adding album management. Albums can be organized based on shoot days, camera models, or other criteria, while batch adjustments for metadata and raw settings are designed to save time. Through the LightBox view, an entire photo collection is visible at once, with filters for ratings, color markers, and edited or unedited images. This makes it possible to edit one photo and immediately see the impact on the entire collection.
The Photo page also supports tethered capture, launching with Sony and Canon cameras. Users can adjust settings such as ISO, exposure, and white balance directly and save images immediately into an album. Resolve FX, Open FX plugins, LUTs, and DCTLs are also available for photos, while cropping and reframing occur at source resolution without loss of quality. Additionally, Blackmagic is integrating the Photo page into Blackmagic Cloud for collaboration. AI also plays a role with IntelliSearch for content and facial recognition in both photos and videos.
More than just photos
DaVinci Resolve 21 brings more new functionality than just photos. A notable novelty is the AI Age Transformer, which allows you to age faces in videos. You can also edit faces yourself with the AI Face Reshaper tool, or smooth them out with the AI Blemish Removal function.
Blackmagic further utilizes AI for its AI UltraSharpen tool, which can upscale video—even if it was previously unusable, according to the company. Finally
Finally, the AI Speech Generator for synthetic voices is noteworthy. It can read text based on existing voice models, but it is also possible to create a unique voice using a personal clip that only needs to be ten seconds long.
Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 21 is available immediately as a beta. The entire suite, including video editing, color and post-processing, and the new Photo page, is as usual available both as a free download and in a more powerful Studio variant for professional use.