DaVinci Resolve 21: Everything We Know About Blackmagic’s Big Update
Blackmagic Design first showed DaVinci Resolve 21 as a public beta ahead of NAB 2026, then shipped the final release in early June 2026 after months of testing. It's a sprawling update with hundreds of new features spanning editing, color, VFX, audio, photography, and AI, of course, and it touches nearly every page of the application. Here's a rundown of what's actually new, based on Blackmagic's own release notes and hands-on coverage from outlets that tested the final build.
A Whole New Page: Photo
The headline feature, and one of the features I am most excited about, is the Photo page, an entirely new workspace that brings Resolve's color-grading toolset to still photography for the first time. It sits alongside the familiar Cut, Edit, Fusion, Color, Fairlight, and Deliver pages, letting photographers and colorists move between stills and video without leaving the app.
The Photo page organizes images into Photo Albums, which act as the central container for a shoot. Photos are resolution- and frame-rate-independent (unlike timelines), and grades applied to a still are shared across every album that references it, since corrections are applied at the source level rather than per-instance. The page also ships with a large built-in effects library pulling from Resolve FX and Fusion FX, plus tools to tag, star-rate, and filter images.
I will be curious to sink my teeth into this new feature as I have been living in Lightroom for most of my career and always welcome new options. Especially in a program I already use for editing video.
A related new feature lets you tether a Sony or Canon camera directly to Resolve for live capture — adjusting ISO, exposure, and white balance from within the app, monitoring a live view, and saving capture presets so a shoot maintains a consistent look. Captured images land straight into an album.
The AI Additions
Blackmagic has leaned harder into AI this cycle than in past releases, and most of it is aimed at speeding up organization and finishing work:
IntelliSearch lets you search your media pool using natural-language or dialogue keywords, matching on objects, people, and spoken content rather than filenames or metadata alone.
CineFocus is a synthetic depth-of-field tool that lets you adjust focal emphasis after the shot has already been captured, with keyframeable rack-focus control.
Face Age Transformer and Face Reshaper give editors the ability to age or de-age a tracked subject, or adjust the shape and position of facial features on moving footage.
Blemish Removal handles skin retouching directly inside Resolve.
SlateFinder and SlateID automatically detect a clapperboard in frame and read its data to populate clip metadata. Very useful for production workflows that use slates for information and syncing audio.
UltraSharpen is a new Resolve FX plugin for high-fidelity sharpening of moving footage, and Motion Deblur removes common motion-blur artifacts. UltraNR noise reduction has also been improved for UHD and higher-resolution timelines.
Worth noting: a few outlets covering this release have circulated feature names like "IntelliTrack," "Color Slice," and "Voice to Subtitle" that don't actually appear in Blackmagic's official release notes for version 21; those tools trace back to Resolve 19 and appear to have been mixed up with this release in some reviews. Worth double-checking Blackmagic's own changelog if you see a feature name you can't otherwise verify.
Camera and Format Support
Resolve 21 adds native decoding for several RAW formats: Canon CR3, Panasonic Lumix RW2, Fujifilm RAF, and Apple ProRAW, plus support for compressed Sony ARW files from the Sony a7 V and newer bodies. Nikon NEF handling has been improved, HDR support for common still formats has expanded, and the update adds compatibility for Sony Burano Version 3 footage.
Editing, Color, and Fusion Updates
The Edit and Cut pages pick up improved keyframing and broader graphic-format support, along with a batch of quality-of-life changes: a timeline menu action for selecting transitions, the ability to paste and remove clip attributes (color, markers, flags, crop position), audio-channel switching across multi-clip selections, stereoscopic and multicam support in the source tape, and match-frame support for nested clips and multicams. Media bins now support tabbed layouts, per-bin thumbnail/list/metadata views, star ratings, smart-bin filtering for offline clips, and exporting bin thumbnails as a PDF. Project settings and preferences can now be searched directly.
On the Color page, MultiMaster trim passes, layer-list node graphs, and group versions give colorists more flexible ways to manage grades across clips. You can create and manage multiple grade versions within a group, and pull individual clips out of a group for separate grading.
Fusion gets the biggest visual-effects upgrade: over 100 new motion-graphics tools arrive via a library called Krokodove, ranging from utility and data tools to customizable 2D/3D templates. A redesigned Macro Editor adds an inspector view and simplified publishing for custom tools. Fusion also adds native support for Lottie animation files (usable as drag-and-drop stingers, lower thirds, and titles) and OGraf HTML graphics, along with updated USD support (USD SDK 25.11 with Hydra 2.0), 3D matte objects and textures, and relief-map creation. A big win for quick turn around on your motion graphic heavy projects.
Fairlight adds a folder function for organizing audio tracks more easily, and subtitle tracks now support fade in and out.
Immersive and VR Workflows
Blackmagic is positioning this as Resolve's most complete immersive-media release yet. New spherical Panomap rotation makes it easier to adjust pitch, tilt, pan, yaw, and roll on 360-degree footage, and ILPD retargeting data can now be applied in Fusion for more advanced stereoscopic compositing. Apple Immersive video now supports foveated rendering, which concentrates rendering resources on where the viewer is looking to reduce GPU load. On the delivery side, a new MainConcept encoder option accelerates H.265 and MV-HEVC renders in both 4:2:0 and 4:2:2.
Collaboration and Cloud
Blackmagic Cloud project sync is reportedly up to three times faster than in previous versions, which should help teams working on shared project libraries remotely.
Pricing and Availability
DaVinci Resolve 21 is a free download for Mac, Windows, and Linux. DaVinci Resolve Studio, the paid tier, costs $295 as a one-time purchase (not a subscription) and adds extras like editing beyond 4K, full-resolution photo exports, and some of the more advanced AI and Resolve FX tools. Fusion Studio, the standalone compositing app, is also priced at $295.
Is It Worth Updating?
If you're coming from Resolve 18 or 19, the jump will feel substantial. The Photo page alone is a new category of tool, and the AI additions cover real gaps (slate reading, focus adjustment, de-aging) rather than just refining existing features. If you update every cycle, some of this will feel more incremental, since a chunk of the release is refinement of the Edit, Color, and Fusion pages rather than net-new capability. Either way, it's a free download, so the lowest-risk move is simply to install it and see how it behaves on your own projects. A few users on Blackmagic's forums have flagged rough edges in newer features like Fusion keyframe editing on the Edit page, which is worth keeping in mind if you're on a tight deadline.
Sources: Blackmagic Design's official "What's New" page and product page, Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve 21 New Features Guide, and reporting from PetaPixel, Newsshooter, and RedShark News.
