Blackmagic shipped DaVinci Resolve 21 on 2 June 2026, about six weeks after showing it at NAB. Then, on 7 September — four days before IBC opened — they shipped 21.1, which is a bigger release than most companies would call a full version. Between them you are looking at somewhere north of 150 new features, a whole new page, and one architectural change that nobody put on the marketing page but that will matter more than the rest of it combined.
I cut broadcast promos by day and client work at night, and I run all three major NLEs in a normal month. So this is not a feature list read off a press release. It is what changed, what I actually opened, and what I would tell an editor deciding whether to spend a weekend on it.
The Photo page is the real headline
Resolve is now a stills editor. Not “you can grade a JPEG on the colour page” — an actual photo application with its own page, its own library, and its own import path.
- Native RAW for the major manufacturers, including Canon CR3 and Apple ProRAW
- Library management — albums, ratings, favourites, tagging and collections
- Tethered shooting direct from Sony and Canon bodies
- Lightroom catalogue import, so you are not starting from zero
- The full node graph on stills — curves, qualifiers, power windows, the same tools you grade footage with
That last point is the one worth sitting with. Every other photo editor gives you a stack of sliders. Resolve gives you a node tree, which means the grading logic you have already built as a colourist transfers straight across. If you have ever wanted to qualify a skin tone on a portrait the way you would on a face in a scene, that is now a thing you can do without exporting anything.
Hybrid shooters. If you deliver a real estate video and the stills gallery, or shoot a wedding film and the photo set, you have been paying for two ecosystems and colour-matching them by eye. This collapses that into one application with one grade. For pure video editors, the Photo page is a curiosity. Be honest with yourself about which one you are.
The catch, and it is a real one: full-resolution photo export is Studio only. The free build lets you import, cull, tag and grade, which is enough to evaluate the workflow properly, but not enough to deliver from.
The AI tools, ranked by how often you’ll actually use them
Resolve 21 added a lot of machine-learning features. They are not equally useful, and the demo-friendliest ones are the ones you will open least. Here is my honest ordering after living with them.
Tools I use most weeks
AI IntelliSearch lets you search the media pool for people or objects rather than filenames. On a 400-clip corporate job where the assistant named everything A001_C0034, this is not a novelty, it is twenty minutes back. It is the single most quietly valuable AI feature in the release.
Automatic slate detection reads the slate in frame and populates clip metadata from it. If you work with production that actually slates properly, this removes a genuinely tedious ingest step.
Tools I use on specific jobs
CineFocus refocuses a shot after capture and builds convincing bokeh. It will not rescue a badly missed focus pull, and you should not sell it to a client as insurance. What it is good for is adding shallow depth to a flat drone or gimbal plate so it cuts against your prime lens coverage.
AI sharpening and motion blur removal are archive tools. When a client hands you 2014 footage from a camera nobody should have used, these earn their keep.
Tools that demo better than they work
Face editing — age transformation, facial reshaping, blemish removal. Blemish removal is fine and saves a Fusion round trip. Age transformation and reshaping are, for client work, a conversation you do not want to have. Know they exist; think hard before you use them on a real person.
Speech generation turns text into spoken voice inside Fairlight. Useful for scratch VO so you can lock timing before the talent records. Not useful as a deliverable, and any client who has heard a real VO will hear the difference.
Here is the NAB build being pulled apart before release, which is still the clearest look at how these tools behave in a timeline rather than in a keynote:
