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.

> 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.

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.

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 Darktable only has rather outdated wavelet and non-local means denoising.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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.