alt Hacker NewsI'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.