DaVinci Resolve has long held a place in our guide to the best video editing software. It seems we might soon have to add it to our pick of the best photo editing software too.
The app's developer, Blackmagic Design, has announced a flurry of news ahead of the NAB 2026 trade show in Las Vegas next week. There's new hardware, but the headline announcement for a lot of people is the launch of DaVinci Resolve 21 in beta with a new photo-editing workflow, including support for RAW images.
As Blackmagic CEO Grant Petty casually announces towards the end of the presentation above, DaVinci Resolve 21 is now available in public beta, and the update is huge. There are lots of new AI features for video editing, but the really radical change is the addition of a dedicated Photo page, allowing the software's Hollywood-level colour-grading tools to be used to edit stills.
The DaVinci Resolve Photo page has its own tab between the Media and Cut pages. You can import photos in a range of common RAW formats and manage them in albums, which appear as timelines on the Color, Cut and Edit pages.
On the Photo page itself, you can reframe and crop images at their original source resolution and aspect ratio. The really powerful part is integration with the Color page, allowing full use of DaVinci's node-based system to apply primary colour corrections, curves, qualifiers and power windows just like you would on video.
Nodes can be added in series or parallel to build complex grades, and localised corrections can be applied to different parts of an image simultaneously. You can also use shared nodes to apply the same grade across an entire album of photos at once to save time.
Resolve FX and Open FX plug-in support is available on the Photo page. You can apply LUTs, effects, graphics, transforms and DCTLs, and you can also use DaVinci Resolve’s native AI tools, including AI Magic Mask to select people or objects and a new AI UltraSharpen to enhance low resolution images.
A LightBox view provides a view of an entire album at once. This allows you to select an image, grade it and see the results update across the collection in real time.
There are even tethered shooting capabilities. Camera Controls allow images to be captured live from Canon and Sony cameras directly to the software. You can adjust settings such as ISO, exposure, white balance, monitor with live view and save capture presets before shooting and saving images directly into an album.
This update could shake up a lot of photographers and content creators' workflows, particularly for those who work with both stills and video. DaVinci Resolve Studio is already the industry-leading program for colour grading and effects, and its one-off cost makes it a relatively economical alternative to subscription-based software like Adobe's Premiere. There's even a free version that has most of the basic features to get started.
Photo-editing in DaVinci resolve doesn't have the same vast multitude of tools as Photoshop for masking, retouching and compositing, but the image organisation and colour-grading tools could make it a very attractive alternative to an app like Lightroom.
What else is new in DaVinci Resolve 21?
As well as the new Photo page, DaVinci Resolve 21 introduces a load of new features for video editors. There's a bunch of new AI-powered tools, the most surprising of which is the AI Face Age Transformer for aging and de-aging faces – yes, really; time to make your own Here! You can enter the subject’s age and adjust the age offset slider to add or remove wrinkles and facial fullness.
There's also an AI Face Reshaper for changing the size of facial features and AI Blemish Removal. AI IntelliSearch to search clips for people or objects, and a vastly simplified AI Speech Generator can turn written text to spoken voice, with the option to create custom voices based on a sample as short as ten seconds.
Other new AI tools include AI UltraSharpen, AI Motion Deblur and AI CineFocus for lens effects like shaping bokeh, and there's a quick-access render in place option for AI Magic Mask, which should help avoid the frustration of having to retrack the mask if the data is lost.
The DaVinci Resolve 21 public beta is free to download from the Blackmagic Design website for existing customers who have bought the full studio version of DaVinci Resolve.
