Darkroom is known for its modern, [Apple Design Award-winning design](/blog/2020-07-apple-design-award), and its app icon is no exception. We thought it would be interesting to gain an inside look from Jasper Hauser, the co-founder and designer behind Darkroom, on the how and why he designs Darkroom's app icons.

### What's the story behind the two triangles logo?

Founders Majd Taby and [Matt Brown](https://thingsthatarebrown.com) designed the [original Darkroom logo and app icon](/blog/2015-02-introducing-darkroom-10) - the two mountains and purple gradient - inspired by the majestic Norwegian mountains near Bergen. The minimalist, silhouette-style design emphasizes the beauty of the landscape and provides a subtle reference to photography. It's easily recognizable and memorable.

### Why has the app icon changed over the years?

When Jasper took the reins of Darkroom's design with the 2.0 release in 2017, he set himself a challenge: to update the logo without sacrificing its essence. Aiming to make the app icon dynamic and creative, the core visual brand idea was to reflect the tool's ability to empower photographers. Inspired by brands like Nike and Apple who have stayed [loyal to their main logo shape but are always creative with their brand](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XfzA9KDF88), always reflecting their evolving style and our changing world. And let's be honest, we also really liked the idea of having a fresh new look on our home screen now and then.

App icon updates are also practical and serve as a beacon for customers, alerting them to a major update. Apple provides a blue dot, but honestly, a bolder approach - a shiny new app icon - is more effective for grabbing attention and letting customers know something exciting is happening.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2023-01-app-icons-major-versions.jpg"
  wide
  alt="A grid of 2 x 3 Darkroom default app icons for all major versions"
  caption="6 major updates of Darkroom's default app icon, one family, very different personalities."
/>

### What drove each evolution of the app icon?

We love to shake things up with a new app icon for each major update. It's a great way to draw attention and add some fun. The icon should still be connected to the old one in some way, to keep a balance between innovation and consistency.

- **Version 1 and 2** of the app icon have sharp corners, in line with the prevailing visual design esthetics of iOS at the time. In version 2, texture was added and the colors softened to give the brand more depth and warmth.
- **Version 3:** The switch to photo-realism in the icon was a visual protest of the loss of visuals due to iOS 7 in 2013. The neon lights loosely referenced the red lights used in the analog darkroom. And, this major visual change matched the magnitude of the app update itself.
- **Version 4:** We wanted Darkroom to fit in on iPad, so we returned to a simpler, warmer aesthetic, where detail was provided by subtle, softer shading rather than photo-realism. The logo shape was also more rounded by giving the two mountains rounder corners, removed the gap, and had the two mountains overlap instead.
- **Version 5:** For our Mac app the app icon got a makeover referencing the colorful and bold [Aqua visual style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)). The shape and color palette was kept similar to the main variants made for version 4, adding a glass-like texture, and making it feel like a big change by re-introducing the boldly colored frame.
- **Version 6:** The addition of Masks was a big deal in terms of creative possibilities. To reflect the app's ability to smartly select parts of a photo, the logo was enhanced with stars in the background and a warm, dusky color segmented gradient inspired by atmospheric perspective.

###  Why does Darkroom have app icon variants?

Around version 4, Apple had just released dark mode and other apps had begun offering icon customization as a premium feature. We decided to [introduce app icon customization](/blog/2020-02-watermark-subscription#app-icons), which included both historical default icon variants and new creative variants for [Darkroom+](/darkroom+) customers to pick from. And a small gourd of people wasn’t always a fan of our more recent app icon changes. App icon customization is a win-win - they get to personalize their app to express their own personal style and we get to flex our creative muscles.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2023-01-app-icons-variations.jpg"
  wide
  alt="A grid of 5 x 6 app icons showing all of Darkrooms available app icon variants"
  caption="With 29 variants Darkroom provide a wide selection of unique icons for people to customize their home screen."
/>

### Are there any underlying patterns in all the icon variants?

Yes, all variants are thematically relevant and connected, referencing either a recent or historical visual style related to Apple's brand, something from our own history, or popular culture. They should be fun, creative, or nostalgic. Over the years, the logo shape has transitioned to be friendlier, bigger within the app icon's rounded rectangle, and the color palette brighter and more colorful. Texture and shading are used to make each variant distinct.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2023-01-app-icons-posters.jpg"
  wide
  alt="Two posters on a wall side-by-sde, each featuring a large selection of released and unreleased app icons"
  caption="These two posters where presents given to the team, featuring all of our major app icon updates, as well as many sketches and variants."
/>

### How will the app icon evolve next?

We don't know what future holds for our app icon. We'll decide closer to the next major release. In the meantime we collect visuals, icons, color palettes, sketches and feedback to create an inviting, warm and visually appealing icon. Eventually, we choose the one that catches our eye. Stay tuned!

Darkroom's app icon has evolved over time, staying true to the original design while being creative and reflecting the changing world and user needs. Our commitment to design excellence and staying up-to-date reflects the app as a whole, and will remain the visual brand cornerstone for years.


Explore the design thinking behind Darkroom's app icon evolution. Learn why the logo and app icon have changed and the reasons behind each variation.

The art behind the Darkroom app icon

Today, we’re excited to announce the addition of Color Grading as a new [Darkroom+](/darkroom+) feature, unlocking opportunities for creative expression that were previously impossible in Darkroom. It's an essential tool to give your photos and videos a distinct style and for making presets. Oh, and it’s also our first new top-level tool since [Frames in 2018](/blog/2018-06-frames)!

With the four Color Grading wheels, you can now adjust the overall tone of your photo or video by changing the *color*, *saturation*, and *luminance* globally, or in your highlights, midtones, or shadows. It’s remarkable how far you can go in creating unique stylistic looks only using this new Darkroom+ tool.






## How Color Grading works

You’ll find four independent wheels in the Color Grading tool. Each wheel affects a specific tonal region of your photo: *Global*, *Highlights*, *Midtones*, or *Shadows*.

Each grading wheel has a handle in the center to adjust the Hue and Strength of the color adjustment, and two sliders, one on either side, to adjust the Luminance and Saturation in those regions.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-12-06-grading-wheels.jpg"
  alt="The four Color Wheels in Darkroom; Global, Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows"
  caption="Color Grading has been commonly used tool in Film and Video editing for a long time. Only recently has it started to appear as a photo editing tool, because it's so powerful and intuitive to achieve stylistic looks."
/>

Behind the scenes, the Color Grading algorithm adjusts its impact on a per-pixel basis to ensure that the structure of your photo remains the same. In particular, white pixels remain white, and black pixels remain black. Similarly, highly saturated pixels are protected. These constraints apply to all the sliders and wheels in the Color Grading Tool, making it safe to use on photos without introducing unnatural color shifts.

> Note: Separating the midtones from highlights and shadows is particularly useful for preserving skin tones, since those are typically only in the midtones, which means you can now easily make your shadows teal and your highlights orange, without affecting the skin tones in the middle!

## How to incorporate Color Grading into your editing workflow

You know how sometimes you put on a pair of tinted sunglasses and it makes everything look like the sunset? With the global color wheel, you can essentially do the same thing. If you’re taking a photo of a sunset, you might want to make the overall tones of the photo more purple or red. If you’re taking photos of fall colors, maybe more orange. If you’re taking photos of the sea, maybe blue!

In general, color grading can be used to add a cohesive look to a set of photos, to make a photo pop by emphasizing certain colors, or to correct color imbalances in a photo. It can also be used to create a specific mood or atmosphere in a photo. To get the most out of color grading, it’s important to experiment with the different controls to see the effects of your changes and fine-tune the color grade to achieve the look you want.

Because these adjustments are purely stylistic, we suggest that you perform them at the end of your editing process. First, crop and straighten to get your composition tight. Then, make any lighting corrections, and finally, add any color grading adjustments on top.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-12-06-wheels-iphone.jpg"
  alt="Color Grading iPhone 14 Pro"
  caption="Tip: when moving a slider or wheel handle you will see a description of the respective slider and it's value."
  wide
/>

## Color Grading really shines for making presets

Before this release, if you wanted to shift the colors in a photo, you had to resort to the white balance sliders and individual color and curves edits. This worked, but the process was complicated and indirect. Furthermore, if the photo required a white balance adjustment, it could conflict with the changes in your preset.

Now with the Color Grading tool, you can adjust the brightness, saturation, and hues of your photo all from one convenient place.

If you want your preset to be bright, you can increase the luminance globally. If you wanted the shadows to be desaturated, you can do that with the shadows saturation slider, and if you wanted your hues to be just the right shade of orange, it’s now a single swipe, rather than fiddling with multiple color curves.

By making the process more streamlined, you can focus more on the effects of your presets, not the mechanics of how to achieve that look.

---

## A familiar, new scrolling toolbar

To accommodate the new tool in the toolbar on the iPhone, we made the toolbar scroll. If you are looking for the History Tool, you will likely have to scroll a bit to the right. This does not change anything about the accessibility of Flag & Reject, those action remain accessible by swiping right, or tapping on the small left arrow in the toolbar.

This gives us the space to add more incredible tools in the future as Darkroom matures…

<Video
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-12-06-toolbar.mp4"
  loop
  autoPlayWhenVisible
/>

---

If there’s something you’d like to see in the future please let us know by leaving it on our [suggestion board](/suggest), or by sending us an [email](mailto:feedback@darkroom.co) or [tweet](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom) at us. For a full detailed list of all changes please [visit our updates page](/updates).

As always, we’re very thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you soon.

_The Darkroom Team_

Color Grading unlocks new creative expression, giving your photo or video a distinct style by adjusting the tone of your shots.

By <a href="https://twitter.com/sangsara/">Brandon Lee</a> emulating Fujifilm Natura 160

Natura

By <a href="https://twitter.com/sangsara/">Brandon Lee</a> emulating Fujifilm Classic Chrome

Fuji CC

By <a href="https://twitter.com/sangsara/">Brandon Lee</a> emulating Fujifilm Provia 400X

By <a href="https://twitter.com/sangsara/">Brandon Lee</a> emulating Agfa Vista 400 film

Color Grading comes to Darkroom


We're thrilled to release a major upgrade to our exposure recovery sliders that introduces state of the art recovery to highlights and shadows. This was a major technical investment for us that enables a whole new set of edits that were simply out of reach previously.

Five sliders in Darkroom have been rebuilt from the ground up: Exposure, Whites, Highlights, Shadows, and Blacks. These enhancements are available for all image types, though they are particularly powerful for RAW editing workflows, since RAW photos have a lot more detail to recover.

Because highlight & shadow recovery is so central to photo editing workflow, this is among our most consequential updates to Darkroom's rendering engine since 2018 when we added RAW editing support.

<YoutubeEmbed id="ovJBPTnjHdw" title="New! Highlight & Shadow Recovery Revamp in Darkroom"/>


## The importance of highlight & shadow recovery

Unless you're at a Hollywood production stage, you're at the mercy of environmental lighting when taking photos. More often than not, the sky will be brighter than you want, and the shadows will be darker than you want. As a result, photos straight off the camera don't look the way your eyes were perceiving the scene, and that's where highlight & shadow recovery becomes critical. By recovering details that are hard to see, more of your scene is comfortably visible, and your photo tells a more nuanced and complete story.

<MediaDiff
  originalSrc="/assets/images/posts/2022-10-hs-amsterdam-before.jpg"
  originalAlt="Before"
  modifiedSrc="/assets/images/posts/2022-10-hs-amsterdam-after.jpg"
  modifiedAlt="After"
  caption="You can now make edits that look as if you turned on the lights outdoors, without losing any detail."
  wide
/>

If you shoot with a dedicated camera (as opposed to an iPhone), you'll be all too familiar with this process. On an iPhone however, the native camera app steps in to try and resolve this problem for you at capture-time. AI-powered algorithms capture multiple photos with different exposures, and blend them seamlessly. This can often be exactly what you need, but in certain cases, the effect can misjudge, or the corrections can be too intense, so you still need access to these sliders to take creative ownership over your photos.

---

## Strong Technical Underpinnings

This release is the culmination of 9 months of hard work trying to balance multiple advanced algorithms across a variety of image types and conditions, while improving performance and stability.

<p style={{ marginBottom: "1em" }}>
  Under the hood, these new sliders combine three algorithms:
</p>

1. A luminance curve that adjusts the dark or bright areas of the image. This is the starting point, but as you recover highlights and shadows simultaneously, the midtones tend to get flattened out.
2. To counteract that flattening of the midtones, we use a histogram-equalization algorithm to enhance the clarity of those regions, to ensure the entire photos is structurally sound.
3. We also built a frequency-domain algorithm that detects busy areas of the image and enhances the contrast in those highly textured regions.

These algorithms are also spatially aware, so if you have a scene with a large soft sky and a field of grass below, the two areas will be affected differently, depending on their internal structure.

<MediaDiff
  originalSrc="/assets/images/posts/2022-10-hs-mountains-before.jpg"
  originalAlt="Before"
  modifiedSrc="/assets/images/posts/2022-10-hs-mountains-after.jpg"
  modifiedAlt="After"
  caption="Our spatially aware algorithms ensure your shadow edits will not effect the midtones and highlights, and vice versa."
  wide
/>

## How to Upgrade your Existing Edits

The new implementation of the five exposure sliders lives side by side with the previous one. All your previously-edited photos remain unaffected and will continue to use the old implementation. This ensures that your edited photos won't look different when you open them again. If you would like to upgrade a previously-edited photo to use the new version of our sliders, please first reset your edits by selecting the "Original" preset, using the “Reset Edits” option in the actions menu, or using the “Reset” option the History tool.

When applying any preset, regardless of what version it was made with, we will use the new recovery algorithms. This ensures that community presets and existing presets won't be stuck with the old legacy recovery implementation.

<div id="extension"></div>

---

## A goodbye to the Photos Edit Extension

This new implementation of exposure recovery is much more resource-intensive than our previous one. As a result, we were forced to make the tough decision to deprecate the Photos Editing Extension from Darkroom. This means you will no longer be able to make edits from within the Apple Photos app using our extension.

<p style={{ marginBottom: "1em" }}>There were three reasons for this:</p>

1. The Photo Editing Extension does not provide us with the full resolution image. This prevents us from being able to provide the same tools in the extension as we do in the app, and we do not want the editing experience to diverge any further.
2. Photo Editing Extension is a very memory-constrained environment, and these new and existing advanced algorithms cannot run reliably in it. We couldn't guarantee its performance at a level we were happy with
3. Not enough of our customers were using it to justify its continued investments, and due to the aforementioned constraints, it took an inordinate amount of resources to maintain.

As a replacement, you can use our **Share Extension** to quickly open a photo from the Photos app in Darkroom. In the Photos app, you can tap Share, then tap Darkroom in the suggested app section of the system share sheet. If Darkroom doesn't appear, scroll to the end of the suggested app list (right), tap the big three dots (•••) and add Darkroom as a favorite.

We understand that a number of Darkroom customers who relied on the Photos Edit Extension will be disappointed, but we hope you understand our reasoning for removing it.

<div id="icons"></div>

## **Darkroom+** Bonus

We added 3 new app icon variants, available to our [Darkroom+](/darkroom+) subscribers. **Shadow** provides a dark on dark version of our current icon, a wink to our impressive shadow recovery. **Holo** is the bright variant, to balance out the dark. And the **Album** option harkens back to skeuomorphic heydays off icon design. Bringing the total number of icons to choose from to a whooping 30!

![Three new app icons; Shade, Holo, and Album](/assets/images/posts/2022-10-hs-icons.jpg)

---

If there’s something you’d like to see in the future please let us know by leaving it on our [suggestion board](/suggest), or by sending us an [email](mailto:feedback@darkroom.co) or [tweet](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom) at us. For a full detailed list of all changes please [visit our updates page](/updates).

As always, we’re very thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you soon.

_The Darkroom Team_


Highlight & Shadow recovery sliders get a major upgrade that dramatically improves their recovery range and refines the result.

State of the Art Highlight and Shadow Recovery in Darkroom


We are in awe of the amount and speed at which the Darkroom community of photo editors has created and shared quality presets. Thank you, and please keep it going!

We thought it would be fun and useful to take a look through all the presets that have been shared in the community over the last few weeks [since we released preset sharing](/blog/2022-10-preset-sharing). Below you will find a pretty incredible collection of highlights we curated for you.

## Analog Film

A significant portion of the presets shared have been those that are emulating analog film. Which are tricky ones to get right. We have to say we are super impressed with the quality and faithfulness in which the community has created these presets.

<PresetCollection
  ids={[
    "302D9C13-78B0-4EF8-9FC1-526B33CA10F4",
    "C8517D31-9B7C-419F-9099-4FB27D098020",
    "3DA1FC4C-7412-4E19-BFBC-80F32E3FA8C2",
    "D9E6C4FC-D46F-474F-A8F3-02342688C3F3",
    "949D7035-0C93-409D-AD85-A7F593423B75",
    "D18C89AD-19ED-4606-AE96-E8DF4915F045",
    "76A19AA8-BAE3-43DC-8AD6-80D34C879EC1",
    "623D7699-F49A-4420-83F8-2E984171FC8D",
    "ED03B6BA-EAEE-4DEF-9D9E-C1B5AFF2EF31",
  ]}
  presets={presets}
/>

We are particularly impressed by the wide selection of faithful film simulation presets that [Brandon Lee](https://twitter.com/sangsara/) has created, many of which are listed above. It’s been particularly fun watching him [create and share these openly on Twitter](https://twitter.com/sangsara/status/1580734751404883968). We highly recommend giving him a follow.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-1029-sangsara.jpg"
  alt="Selection of photos by Brandon Lee"
  caption="Photos by Brandon Lee. Left photo uses 'AV4'. Right photo uses 'CPB'."
/>

---

## Independent

We are also seeing an amazing array of original independent presets being created and shared. All will with a completely unique look. What’s awesome to see is with which care and attention to detail these have been made to work amazingly well in a wide set of subjects.

<PresetCollection
  ids={[
    "86649FC4-FD3E-4E10-8620-B465603B3AFD",
    "70B04D2A-D57D-408F-B70E-9CE03F0F6BCB",
    "38A766B8-7969-4352-99D0-4FAEF354FCEC",
    "40FEBA06-6CB1-4ED6-9F44-4898619A96FB",
    "F375F535-5FF9-47A0-B1A9-CCE106A28E5A",
    "490ED009-4132-4CBC-96FB-C31A6FA158DF",
    "2AC59924-8ADC-45FC-9A4B-678B9DDC98C2",
  ]}
  presets={presets}
/>

We also really like the "Tatton" preset made by [Youtuber David Addison](https://www.youtube.com/c/DavidAddison1), please subscribe to his channel! David says Tatton was designed specifically for [Bayer RAW](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter). And works well on properly exposed images with a small exposure range.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-1029-pisicul-meu.jpg"
  alt="Selection of photos by David Addison"
  caption="Photos by David Addison. All photos are using the preset 'Tatton'"
/>

---

## Black and White

Making a shot black and white is not just a matter of turning saturation all the way down. In Darkroom the color and curves tools  continue to be applied to the underlying colors before they are desaturated, giving you full control over the underlying color in a black and white photo.

<PresetCollection
  ids={[
    "C6C06A8C-89F3-43A4-857B-B15A998D35E0",
    "88F1C5D9-5B67-4806-9770-F00A9A454DAE",
    "AD571CFC-C644-47E6-A933-AC44F52B38C3",
    "58C17CF3-5BC8-41D6-87EB-37287BDAA846",
  ]}
  presets={presets}
/>

Our good friend [Maykel Loomans](https://twitter.com/miekd) dove head first into creating a wonderful set of black and white presets. Each carefully crafted for specific lighting and camera scenarios. All of which Maykel has detailed in [well worth to read twitter thread](https://twitter.com/miekd/status/1581349714657624064).

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-1029-miekd.jpg"
  alt="Selection of photos by Maykel Loomans"
  caption="Photos by Maykel Loomans. Left uses 'Loomon Profil 200'. Right top uses 'Profil 200', and bottom right '800'."
/>

---

### How can you share a preset?

Perhaps you already created a preset you’d like to share? You can do so by selecting the preset you want to share, tap on it again (•••) to view its options and you’ll find the new “Share” button. From the share sheet, you’ll be able to share a link to anyone, whether they have Darkroom installed or not.

Anyone with your link can preview and install your presets with a tap. That’s pretty much it! There are no files to manage, host, download or import. It couldn’t be simpler or more flexible.

We also have this tutorial video for you, explaining how to create and share a preset!

<YoutubeEmbed id="MEYE0MeQx58" title="Make Your Own Custom Presets on iPhone" />

---

We are super excited to have finally unlocked the many custom presets we know so many of you have created, which you are all finally sharing. We can’t wait to shine a spotlight on the next batch of interesting presets shared over the coming weeks and months. Don't hesitate to tag or message/email us your creations! We truly hope to build a community around presets and our shared love of photo editing.

_The Darkroom Team_


We curated a collection of the best community presets from those shared in the last few weeks.

By <a href="https://twitter.com/sangsara/">Brandon Lee</a> emulating Cross Process

By <a href="https://twitter.com/mattmaber/">Matt Maber</a>

KodaChrome 25

By <a href="https://twitter.com/LenzAtemporal">Jonathan Lenzmeier</a> emulating Fujifilm Cross Process

Classic Negative

By <a href="https://twitter.com/tony_martinez/">Tony Martinez</a>

VSCO A9

By <a href="https://twitter.com/mattcorkum/">Matt Corkum</a>

Portra

By <a href="https://twitter.com/miekd/">Maykel Loomans</a>

Loomono Profil 200

Loomono Profil 400

Loomono Profil 800

By <a href="https://twitter.com/MyPhotoYear">MyPhotoYear</a> for subway and metro type moody scenes

Verve 1

By <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/DavidAddison1">David Addison</a>

Tatton

By <a href="https://twitter.com/linuskuner">Linus Kuner</a>

🌞

🏠

By <a href="https://twitter.com/simon_harper/">Simon Harper</a>

Vice

By <a href="https://twitter.com/sangsara/">Brandon Lee</a>

Koji

By <a href="https://twitter.com/JoshCalvetti">Josh Calvetti</a>

Heart-Shaped Sunglasses

By <a href="https://twitter.com/darkhorse166">Norman Ma</a>

A Little Punch

20 quality Darkroom community presets


You can now _share_ your custom presets with anyone quickly and easily using a simple link.

Select the preset you want to share, tap on it again (•••) to view its options and you’ll find the new “Share” button. From the share sheet, you’ll be able to share a link to anyone, whether they have Darkroom installed or not.

Anyone with your link can preview and install your presets with a tap. That’s pretty much it! There are no files to manage, host, download or import. It couldn’t be simpler or more flexible.

When you install a preset, it will be added to a new “Community” preset pack in your Preset tool, where it can be used like any normal preset.
We’ll track how many times your presets has been installed, and how many photos and videos have been exported using them, giving you an idea of how popular your presets are.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-10-preset-sharing-manage.jpg"
  alt="Left: preset actions highlighting the share and unshare options. Right: a preset webpage"
  wide
/>

## Community Preset Highlights

We asked some friends and photographers to share some of their own favorite presets to celebrate the launch and included them right here! Just tap on the “Install” button below.

<PresetCollection
  ids={[
    "4E2E99EC-6C56-420C-B13E-F5F8EA2D24A3",
    "6BCE3248-694F-4209-AC84-61AD58B10B0A",
    "86591B4A-9E02-4395-95CC-CE597314FE80",
    "9F0DEEF4-5D57-484E-A0C2-5D38AF5A04FD",
    "46D97044-D871-4511-8B61-2D630AFAC1C0",
    "612D17B2-F040-4AA7-B895-07E972AF848F",
  ]}
  presets={presets}
/>

## The full details on Preset Sharing

When sharing a preset for the first time, we generate a set of high quality preview images using several high bit-depth and wide gamut images bundled with the app. We upload these to iCloud so anyone with a preset link can get a preview of what your preset looks like when applied on a variety of subjects, scenes and lighting conditions.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-10-preset-sharing-install.jpg"
  alt=""
  wide
/>

Shared presets are easily identified by the chain link icon in the Preset tool, so you know you have shared it. If you share your preset again you will instantly get the share sheet with the same URL; Darkroom won’t generate and upload the preset & preview images again.

Please note that once a preset is shared, you can no longer directly update it. If you do want to update a preset regardless, you will first have to unshare it, update it, then share it again. In which case the original URL is retained. Alternatively, you can make a new preset and share it.

The preset link generated remains active and working until you explicitly unshare the preset. To unshare a preset, you can select the shared preset then tap on it again (•••) to show the Preset Options, and tap “Unshare”. If you try to delete a shared preset, you will be prompted to unshare it first.

Finally, it's important to note that presets are not yet automatically synced between all your devices, so your shared presets aren't either. You can either share the link with yourself and install on your other devices, or you can use our manual preset backup and restore feature found in settings.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-10-preset-sharing-community.jpg"
  alt=""
  wide
/>

## Privacy

Preset sharing does _not_ require any type of account, and is completely anonymous. All the edits, statistics, and preview images are stored securely on Apple’s iCloud’s database, and we can’t identify the person from their shared presets. Image statistics are also not associated with your iCloud account in any way.

In your own private and encrypted iCloud database, we track which presets you have previously shared. This ensures we don’t share your preset multiple times from different devices and across installs. This data is encrypted and stored in your private iCloud database, where neither we nor Apple can access that data.

However, please remember that shared presets are public, and anyone with the link can view the preset preview images, the name of the preset, and its usage statistics online.

## Pricing

Creating and sharing presets is free, regardless whether or not the presets use premium Darkroom+ editing features.

Installing presets and trying them out is also free, but if the installed preset uses premium Darkroom+ features, you have to subscribe to export images using it.

---

We hope you are all as excited as we are about finally unlocking the many many custom presets we know so many of you have created, which you’ll finally be able to share with anybody anywhere. We can’t wait to shine a spotlight on some of the best and most interesting presets shared In the coming weeks and months. Don't hesitate to tag or message/email us your creations! We truly hope to build a community around presets and our shared love of photo editing.

---

If there’s something you’d like to see in the future please let us know by leaving it on our [suggestion board](/suggest), or by sending us an [email](mailto:feedback@darkroom.co) or [tweet](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom) at us. For a full detailed list of all changes please [visit our updates page](/updates).

And lastly, we'd like to thank the talented <a href="https://bio.site/joshedgoose" target="_blank">Josh Edgoose</a> for collaborating with us to select 4 of his shots to use as preview images for all your presets.

As always, we’re very thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you soon.

_The Darkroom Team_


Starting today you can share your custom made preset with anybody anywhere with just a simple link.

Give your shots a little west coast beach look, bright vibe, bold water and skies.

Capitola

A warm and colorfull preset by our friends at <a href="https://glass.photo/" target="_blank">Glass</a> that will give your shots a pop.
    

Glass Pop

Warm summer summer look, with red tones and punchy shadows.

MT100

Moody colors and a subtle contras bump, emulating the VSCO A9 preset.

MT200

Bright highlights, faded shadows, detailed and rich browns. Emulating the VSCO M5 preset.

MT300

Vibrant vinatge look, giving your shots a bright and colorful feel.

MA100

Share your presets from Darkroom


Over the past year we launched a large suite of new functionality and in this post we are shining a light on some of the big little details you might have missed. Whether you’re new or a pro, we are sure there’ll be something that will help you get more out of Darkroom, in less time.

## 1\. Present your photos on a big screen

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-08-tip-big-screen.jpg"
  alt="Darkroom on an external display or AirPlay big screen"
/>

Did you know that you can connect your iPhone or iPad to a TV or display, either wired or wireless using [AirPlay](https://www.apple.com/airplay/), to show off your photos on the big screen? We even support device landscape orientation, and allow you to tap the screen when viewing/editing a photo to hide the apps interface for a fully uncluttered immersive presentation.

## 2\. Control which edits you want to copy & paste

![Copy and Paste Edits](/assets/images/posts/2022-08-tip-copy-control.jpg)

By default when you copy edits we only copy your base adjustments (applied preset, adjustment sliders, color and curve edits). We also have the ability for you to explicitly control which edits (aspect ratio, transform, adjustments, masks, frame) you want to copy and paste. This allows you to only copy a frame and its color, only the crop aspect ratio, just the edits, or any combination. Giving you even more powerful control over the consistency of your shoot in your Batch workflow.

## 3\. Automate your workflow with Shortcuts

![Grid of available Apple Shortcut App actions](/assets/images/posts/2022-08-tip-shortcut-actions.jpg)

Our Darkroom Shortcut Actions, for the Apple Shortcuts app, enable you to take photos as an input, edit them, and save them to your library or pass them along to another action. You will be able to add a preset, set the preset intensity, inset on a frame, crop to an aspect preset, and add your watermark to every photo or video processed. From there, you can save it out to a Files folder, upload to Instagram, you name it. [Learn More →](/blog/2021-06-shortcut-actions)

## 4\. Duplicate a Mask

![Duplicate mask menu option](/assets/images/posts/2022-08-tip-mask-duplicate.jpg)

Say you have a Radial mask precisely positioned and set, and you want to use that exact same mask but also want some edits on the inversion of it, but without having to try and manually match it — you can! In the mask options menu found by tapping the [•••] button in the Masks bar, when a mask is active, you will find a “Duplicate Mask” option, just like you will find the “Invert” option there for a Radial mask.

## 5\. Combine Masks

![Combine radial and range masks](/assets/images/posts/2022-08-tip-mask-combine.jpg)

When you add any mask, you can combine that with our range masks to create much more precise selections. It enables you to for example select only the blue sky and not the blue water by combining a linear mask with a color range mask. Or by enabling you to only select the lighter greens in a landscape photo, by combining a color range mask with a luminance range mask.

## 6\. Change the Frame inset size of the frame export option

![Frame tool inset](/assets/images/posts/2022-08-tip-frame-inset.jpg)

When exporting we allow you to add an inset frame to all your exported photos with just a simple tap. When exporting we actually use the last used frame inset size from the Frames tool. So if you want to change the frame inset for export, head to the frame tool and adjust to your hearts content.

## 7\. Hide Preset sets

![Hide preset set](/assets/images/posts/2022-08-tip-preset-hide.jpg)

As your custom preset list grows, we can imagine you might want to focus your preset list and hide our pre-bundled presets. All you have to do it tap the list icon on iPhone or enter Manage mode on iPad and Mac, and you’ll see the option to hide any set of presets you don’t use, enabling you to fully curate your library, making it even easier to navigate and use. Any favorited presets in a hidden set will still show up in Favorites, so you can keep only the ones you love just a tap away. [Learn more about preset management →](/blog/2021-11-manage-filters)

## 8\. Raw + JPG power moves

![Raw + JPG Settings](/assets/images/posts/2022-08-tip-raw+.jpg)

It has gotten quite common for cameras and apps to shoot photos in this combined file format. We provide you the ability to switch between the two formats simply by tapping the badge shown in the top left when viewing or editing the photo.

Additionally, you can also change which of the two formats you would like to load by default. We have set it to RAW, but we can imagine you’d want it to be JPG to make things a bit faster. You can easily change whichever you prefer in our Settings → RAW + JPEG Options.

## 9\. Curves track color gradients explained

![Red Channel Curves](/assets/images/posts/2022-08-tip-curves.jpg)

We’ll be the first to admit that the Curves tool can be a  daunting tool to enter for the first time. Which is why we have worked hard over the years to make it as easy as we could. One of the details that helps quite a bit are the color gradients we show on the curve tracks to help visualize what will happen. Say you are in the Red channel, and you’d move the highlights slider down, as you can see those highlights will be turning cyan. If those track colors wouldn’t have been there, your guess would have been as good as ours as to what would have happened.

## 10\. Customize the app icon and appearance

![Customize app icon](/assets/images/posts/2022-08-tip-icons.jpg)

Over the year we have created a rather large collection of alternate app icons for you to choose from. Every major version has come with an app icon update, and starting with the introduction of Darkroom+ we added a broad set of stylistic variants with several updates as well. Giving you a lot of creative options to customize our app icon on your home screen.

> **Note:** changing the app icon from within the app is not available in the Mac app. We created a [dedicated page detailing how to achieve it manually](/help/appicons)!

Third edition of highlights on 10 tips and tricks to get more out of your Darkroom workflow.

Ten Productivity Tips & Tricks for Your Darkroom Workflow #3


Masks are a fundamental tool for photographers, and Darkroom is proud to introduce them in a powerful package, backed by AI, and designed for mobile photographers as part of [Darkroom+](/darkroom+). **With masks, you can enhance the lighting in a photo or separate a subject from its background to direct the viewer’s eye, thereby telling a more compelling story.**

### In a nutshell...

<ul className="highlight-items">
  <li className="item-ai"><b><a href="#ai">AI-powered masks</a></b> generate a 3D map of the scene in your photo, allowing you to edit the primary subject, foreground, background, and any range in-between.</li>
  <li className="item-smart"><b><a href="#smart">Smart Masks</a></b> intelligently single out the subject, sky, hair, glasses, skin or teeth when editing Portrait and ProRAW photos.</li>
  <li className="item-gradient"><b><a href="#gradient">Gradient & Range masks</a></b> are the standard mask types and can be combined to create pixel-perfect selections that single-out an object or a region of your photo.</li>
  <li className="item-video"><b><a href="#video">Videos also support masks</a></b> with realtime 4K playback, adding another tool to your storytelling tool belt.</li>
  <li className="item-copy"><b><a href="#copy">Copy & Paste Options</a></b> allow you to select which edits you want to paste onto other photos. Now you can apply any combination of adjustments, aspect ratio, frames and masks to an entire photoshoot.</li>
</ul>

Given the size and scope of this update, we are increasing the price of [Darkroom+](/darkroom+) for new members to $5 per month, $30 per year, or $75 for a one-time purchase, which unlocks Masks and all our premium features across iPhone, iPad, and macOS.

**To celebrate this release, we’re offering a 30% discount on our yearly subscription for the next two weeks (starting April 12 '22, ending Appril 26), so you can get [Darkroom+](/darkroom+) for only $20/year.**

<div id="ai"></div>

---

## AI-Powered Subject and Depth Masks for any photo

When you open any photo in Darkroom 6 we automatically process it using our new artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to generate a 3-dimensional understanding of the scene in the photo. We do this realtime and on-device, meaning it fits effortlessly into your existing editing workflow (and respects your privacy).

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-04-masks-point-cloud.jpg"
  alt="Left: in the analog darkroom with an enlarger. Right: analog print mark-ups."
/>

If there are people in the scene, the AI algorithm will also **identify the primary subjects** and allows you to edit them separately. This kind of editing was only possible on Portrait photos in the past, but is now available for all the photos in your library.

### Foreground & Background Masks

The foreground mask allows you to edit the closest areas of your photos separately from areas towards the back. This is similar to the previous Portrait editing feature in Darkroom, but it’s expanded with support for a much wider set of sliders and options.

Background masks are the inverse of the foreground mask. The two masks overlap slightly in the middle of your scene, but their smooth transition makes them ideal for separating the front from the back of your photo.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-04-masks-ai.jpg"
  alt="AI Masks for all photos"
  wide
/>

### Depth Range

The Depth Range mask includes a selector to specify a range of depths in your photo to edit. This range can be inverted, so you edit everything *except* the region specified. This is useful for photos where a person in the middle of the photo needs to stand out from the surrounding environment.

_**Note**: These masks are available for all photos but not for videos. Portrait photos still use the native depth data generated at capture-time._

<div id="smart"></div>

---

## Smart Masks for Portrait & ProRAW Photos

For the first time on iOS, we’re exposing Smart Masks that are captured on iPhone when you shoot in Portrait and ProRAW mode. These incredibly detailed masks have been generated by Apple on iOS for years but have been hidden until now!

Depth editing has existed in Darkroom since 2019, when we were first to expose the foreground and background as editable depth masks. We’ve completely revamped this feature with this release, to dramatically increase its capabilities.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-04-masks-smart.jpg"
  alt="Smart Masks for Portrait and ProRAW"
  wide
/>

### Portrait Photos

Apart from the standard Subject & Depth masks we already discussed, Portrait photos now also contain the following smart masks when available: Skin, Glasses, Hair, and Teeth.

Reducing clarity within a skin mask is a really easy way to smoothen the imperfections or blemishes on skin, and whitening teeth goes a long way towards making a portrait look like it was captured on a person’s best day.

_**Note**: Foreground and Background masks for Portrait photos remains a free feature as they were before this update, but the new Smart Masks are only available to active [Darkroom+](/darkroom+) members._

### ProRAW Photos

When you capture a photo on iPhone with RAW enabled, the resulting ProRAW photo contains not only the 16-bit rich color and light details, but it now also includes some smart masks when available in the photo: Sky, Skin, and Subject.

<div id="gradient"></div>

---

## Gradient Masks

The Linear and Radial masks are the most foundational masks we provide. They enable you to manually mask small or large areas of your photos with touch-friendly controls. Used alongside our broad adjustment toolset, you will be able to more creatively express your story, and direct the viewer’s eyes when experiencing your photography.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-04-masks-gradient.jpg"
  alt="Linear and Radial gradient masks"
  caption="You can invert a radial mask by using the ••• mask actions button and using the invert option."
  wide
/>

### Linear Gradient

Define a linear gradient and apply edits only within that region. This mask type is particularly useful for landscape images, where it comes in handy for editing the sky or the brightness of the foreground.

### Radial Gradient

Radial Masks are very similar to Linear ones, but define an oval region where the adjustments can take effect. Radial masks differ in two key ways however:

1. You can invert a Radial mask, allowing you to edit everything *except* the region specified.
2. You can adjust the feather of a Radial mask, controlling the falloff from the outer edge, to the center of the oval.

Radial masks are perfect for subjects in the photo and portraits.

<div id="range"></div>

---

## Range Masks

Range masks allow you to define specific color or luminance (bright to dark) range in which to apply edits. When combined with other mask types, help you create pixel-perfect masks to edit specific regions and colors.

### Color Range

Color Range masks expose two sliders to make a color selection. The Hue slider specifies the color of the selection, while the Range slider adjusts the spread of the color selection. For example, if you select a green hue, and increase the range, you will also start selecting some yellow and blue, since they are adjacent in the color spectrum.

### Luminance Range

Luminance is another way of describing how bright a pixel is, so the Luminance Range defines a specific range of luminance in your photo, which allows you to edit the bright or dark areas of a photo.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-04-masks-range-combine.jpg"
  alt="Range Masks"
  caption="Combine a mask by tapping the ••• mask options button choosing the one to add."
  wide
/>

## Combining Masks Together

Masks can be combined to create extremely powerful and targeted adjustments. For example:

- You can combine a **color** mask and a **luminance** mask to edit only the bright blue pixels in your image.
- You can combine a **luminance** mask with a **depth** range mask to edit the dark areas in the back of your scene.
- You can combine a **luminance** mask with a **linear** mask to edit the sky in your photo, without affecting anything below the horizon.

<div id="copy"></div>

---

## Copy & Paste Options

Since some masks are image-specific while others are generic, we have revamped our Copy Edits feature to now allow you to select which category of edits are copied. Also allowing you to copy and paste crop aspect, rotation and frames as well as whether to include masks when copying edits.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-04-masks-copy-options.jpg"
  alt="Left: in the analog darkroom with an enlarger. Right: analog print mark-ups."
  wide
/>

<div id="pricing"></div>

---

## Pricing and Availability

Masking is part of our [Darkroom+](/darkroom+) purchase, available for $5/month, $30/year, or for a one-time payment of $75. This purchase unlocks Masking, Video Grading, Curves, Color, Flag & Reject, watermarks, and custom icons.

Foreground & Background editing for Portrait photos remains free as it was before this release. However, all the other mask types are part of our Darkroom+ purchases.

***Please note that from now on, new Darkroom+ features will no longer be available to our legacy Darkroom customers. As a courtesy to our long-time supporters, we provided new premium features for free for two years since our introduction of Darkroom+.***

**All the features you as a legacy customer have access to today will continue to be available to you**, but new features like Masks are only available to Darkroom+ members and those who purchased Darkroom+ using the one-time “Forever” option.

<div id="brand"></div>

---

## Brand Update #6

Every major version of Darkroom comes with a brand update, and version 6 is no different. With this release we further embraced rich coloring and shading of our symbol, to reflect the gained richness of the app itself.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2022-04-masks-app-icons.jpg"
  alt="App icon history of Darkroom, and new Darkroom+ variants"
  wide
/>

We also added additional variants for our [Darkroom+](/darkroom+) members:
- **Atmo**, a study that preceded the final icon we liked so much we couldn’t resists sharing it.
- **Chrome** and **Lightspeed** builds on the vintage 80/90’s theme.
- **Grain** is there for all the analog lovers out there.

*Note: changing the app icon from within the app is not available in the Mac app. We created a dedicated [page detailing how to achieve it manually](https://darkroom.co/help/appicons.html)!*

---

We are really excited for the creative expression masks unlock for everybody, and can't wait to see what amazing imaginative results come from it. We hope you are all as excited as we are, and that you share your creations with everybody.

If there’s something you’d like to see in the future please let us know by leaving it on our [suggestion board](https://darkroom.nolt.io/), or by sending us an email or [tweet](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom) at us. For a full detailed list of all changes please [visit our updates page](https://darkroom.co/updates/).

As always, we’re very thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you soon.

*The Darkroom Team*


We are proud to introduce Masks, a powerful and essential tool for photographers. Backed by AI, and designed for mobile.

Darkroom 6: Make Local Adjustments with Masks


We’re excited to share the new filter tool in Darkroom, providing an easy ways to favorite, hide, reorder, and rename your filter list. The ability to create custom filters is one of the most unique features in Darkroom, and it’s clearly a hit — thousands of filters are created every day! As your filter list grows however, you haven’t had the tools to curate it, manage it, and clean it up, until now.

## Make it yours

Favorite, reorder, and hide filter sets to optimize your library for that extra bit of efficiency in your editing workflow. If you have a filter you use all the time, you can now make it front and center in the filter tool.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-filters-iphones.jpeg"
  alt="Manage Filters on iPhone"
  wide
/>

### Favorite

Favorite the filters you love the most, whether your own, or one of ours. To favorite a filter, tap the ••• button, or right click on the filter to access the favorite button. For multiple filters, the new Manage interface, allows you to quickly favorite as many as you like. Favorite filters always appear first in your list.

![Favorite, Re-order, and Hide](/assets/images/posts/2021-filters-manage.gif)

### Reorder

Drag your Favorites and Custom Filters into any order of your liking to keep your most frequently used Filters within quick reach. Access all of the filter actions from Manage mode by tap-and-holding on iPhone & iPad, or right-clicking on Mac.

### Hide Sets

While you are in Manage mode, hide any set of filters you don’t use, enabling you to fully curate your library, making it even easier to navigate and use. Any favorite filters in a hidden set will still show up in Favorites, so you can keep only the ones you love just a tap away.

## A native feel for iPad & Mac

On your iPad and Mac, you’ll notice a completely new list design for the filter tool that looks and feels more native by more efficiently using the extra space of the larger displays. Additionally, we added extensive mouse and keyboard shortcuts to quickly access actions, and for quickly trying different filters and adjusting their strength, allowing you to try and tweak any of our filters quicker than you ever have before.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-filters-mac.jpeg"
  alt="Filter Managmnet on Mac"
  wide
/>

Use **the ‘j’ and ‘k’ keys to move up and down** the filter list. Once you’ve found the filter you like most you can simply use **the ‘<’ and ‘>’ keys to adjust intensity** by steps of 10%, or hold **the shift key to get precise** and adjust in 1% increments.

> **Note** that this same layout is also used in landscape mode on the larger iPhones. As with all of our keyboard shortcuts, they also work on iPad when one is attached.

## Pro-tip: filter backup & restore

In Settings, you can backup and restore your custom filters to iCloud. Besides enabling you to safe keep your own carefully created filter creations, this **also enables you to have your filters available on your other devices (iPad or Mac)** as long as you use the same App Store account!

## A foundation for more to come…

This update provides us with a solid foundation for more planned improvements to our Filter tool. Allowing you to better organize your current Filter Library before we give you ways to expand it even more…

---

If there’s something you’d like to see in the future please let us know by leaving it on on our [suggestion board](https://darkroom.nolt.io/), or by sending us an email or [tweet](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom) at us. For a full detailed list of all changes please [visit our updates page](/updates/).

As always, we’re very thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you soon.

_The Darkroom Team_

Today, we’re releasing the largest update to our Filter tool since the initial release of Darkroom six years ago.

Manage filters with ease


Darkroom is designed to be easy to navigate, and familiar to use across all your devices. In this guide we’ll help you understand how to get around and where everything can be found.

Darkroom has three main areas:

1.  The **Library View**, where you browse and manage your photos.
2.  The **Photo View**, where you view, edit, and choose between your photos.
3.  The **Export Sheet**, where you save or share your photo.

---

## The Library View

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-welcome-library.jpeg"
  alt="Darkroom libraryt view on iPad and iPhone"
  wide
/>

### Photo Grid

If you have given Darkroom access to all of your photos, you should see them all here, no importing needed. Please note, we don’t do anything with your photos without your explicit consent. We don’t upload them, we don’t analyze them. We just show you your photos.

**1 — Tap to open**. On iPhone and iPad opening a photo to view or edit is as simple as tapping it. On Mac we use the native behavior, which is to double click!

**2 — Batch**. On iPhone and iPad, at the top right you will see the Batch button which will allow you to select multiple photos. At the bottom you will notice that the Batch actions bar appears when you enter Batch mode. You can quickly start Batch selection on iPhone and iPad by swiping left or right on the photos you wish to select! On Mac, you can multi select by default, use the command and shift keys while selecting to extend your selection, and the batch actions show at all times at the top right.

**3 — Settings**. At the top left you will find the gear icon, tap to open our Settings. This is a good place to look around, you’ll find some helpful things.

### Album List

**4 — Albums**. On iPhone you will find a bar at the bottom of your library that has 3 smart albums (Recents, Favorites, Edited) ready for you. But you can also pick any other album on your iPhone by tapping on the left most option with the ^ triangle. Which in turn will show you our Smart Albums and all of your personal Albums on your device. On iPad and Mac, our smart albums and your albums are always listed in the left-hand sidebar.

**5 — Import**. At times you might want to import some photos or videos from a different source than your iPhone photo library. The Import option is the way to do that. It works through Apple’s Files app, so anything connected to it, including your DLSR memory card or connected USB cable will be accessible.

> **Drag and Drop  — ** On Mac you will be able to drag and drop photos to the library from your desktop. And on iPad you can also drag and drop photos from your library to any of the albums shown in the album list on the left.

---

## The Photo View

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-welcome-photo.jpeg"
  alt="Darkroom photo editor on iPhone and iPad"
  wide
/>

### Navigation

Darkroom has unique abilities hidden behind gestures and the keyboard. On iPhone, in the photo view specifically those gestures allow for extremely easy one handed or even just thumb based navigation. We have ensured that you can get around Darkroom without knowing any of these gestures, by just using onscreen buttons. But knowing them is like having a super power.

*   **Previous/Next**. On iPhone and iPad you can also Swipe left or right to navigate between your previous and next photos. This even works when you have your tools open. Allowing you to edit rapidly through photos, or do quick comparisons. On your iPad and Mac you can also use the arrow keys to quickly navigate through your album.
*   **Zoom.** You can do a quick double tap to zoom into your photo, and double tap again to zoom out. Or use a pinch gesture to zoom into any area of the photo you want. And the swipe around with one finger to pan around the photo.
*   **Hide the interface**. When viewing or editing a photo you can simply tap on the photo briefly once to hide all the interface to just see your photo. Just tap once more to show it all again.

### Actions

In our main toolbars shown at the top of Darkroom, actions on the left typically take you back, and actions at the right move you forward.

**1 — Back**. There is a clearly marked Library or < back button to go back to the library. On iPhone and iPad you can also Swipe down to close the photo, and even on Mac you can drag the image downwards.

**2 — Export**. After editing your most likely next step is for you to save to use elsewhere, or share. We explain more on this view further down.

**3 — Actions**. On iPhone we “hide” quite a few secondary options for you here. Ranging from show/hiding the Histogram or Metadata viewer, to many of the photo management options such as “Add to..”. On Mac and iPad we expose quite a few more depending on how much space we have.

**4 — Photostrip**. On both iPad and the Mac we have the Photostrip, which shows you all your photos in a thin strip on the left side of your screen. Allowing you to quickly navigate through your photos. And it even has all the management context menu options you can find in the library.

### Tools

**5 — Swipe up to reveal tools.** When you are viewing a photo you can either tap any of our tools to open them, or you can quickly swipe up to reveal the adjustments (sliders) tool. There are many tools accessible through our main toolbar, and some through or our photo actions menu. We’d like to invite you to please take some time to explore them.

On iPhone we also have the Flag & Reject features accessible by swiping the toolbar right, or tapping on the small < arrow at the left of the toolbar. On iPad and Mac the Flag and Reject options conveniently sit in the toolbar.

**6 — Before and after comparison**. In order to make edits it’s actually pretty useful to be able to check what the original looked like. You can do so very easily by just tap-and-holding your finger or mouse on your edited photo. On iPad and Mac we have a dedicated button for it, the 👁.

---

## The Export Sheet

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-welcome-export.jpeg"
  alt="Export a photo on iPhone and Mac"
  wide
/>

**1 — Save or Share**. All edits made in Darkroom are non destructive. That means that any edit you make isn’t directly applied to the original photo. Instead we render the edits live, which enable you to undo and change your edits at any time in the future. That also means you have to export, using “Save” or “Save Copy”, for any of the edits to show up in other apps outside of Darkroom.

**2 — Export tools.** We offer quick access to adding a frame when you export. This is great for things like Instagram stories, where you want to keep the same aspect ratio. You also have the ability to easily copy some of your hashtag sets for sharing to Instagram.

**3 — Settings.** On iPhone & iPad, there is quick access to settings where we offer several options that relate to exporting all your photos. Which range from setting the file (photo and video) format, to applying a watermark, managing your metadata, or managing your hashtags.

---

## iPhone, iPad and Mac

Darkroom has apps for all of your major devices. We have made sure that the visual language and navigation between our 3 apps is true to the platform, but similar enough that there shouldn’t be much of a learning curve to get around.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-welcome-devices.jpeg"
  alt="Use Darkroom on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac"
  wide
/>

> **Pro-tip, Keyboard Shortcuts** — On Mac and iPad we have made sure to have keyboard shortcuts support. Making it possible to more efficiently move around and do actions by just using your keyboard. To discover all the shortcuts, on iPad tap and hold the command key, and on Mac you can click through the top main menu.

In this guide we aim to help you understand how to get around, and know where everything can be found.

Welcome to Darkroom


With todays update we bring you even more stability and compatibility with the latest improvements on macOS 12 Monterey and iOS 15.

## Shortcuts on Monterey

With macOS 12 Monterey Apple has brought all of the automation power of Shortcuts from iOS over to the Mac. Now on Monterey, Darkroom delivers the exciting use-cases of Shortcuts to macOS: Integrate your entire Darkroom editing workflow into a single Shortcut Action.

> For the uninitiated, a shortcut provides a quick way to get things done with your apps with just a tap or by asking Siri. The Shortcuts app from Apple lets you automate a wide variety of things by enabling you to create your own shortcuts by stringing together multiple actions from different apps. [Head to Apple’s Shortcuts user guide](https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios) for more information on how to create your own.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-monterey-mac.jpeg"
  alt="Visual overview of the new Darkroom Mac Monterey Shortcut Actions"
  wide
/>

## Processed, Cropped, Framed, & Watermarked Photos Right in Your Shortcut Workflows!

Our shortcut actions enable you to take photos as an input, edit them, and save them to your library or pass them along to another action. All of this happens in the background with the full power of our app, not a resource-limited extension. You will be able to add a filter, set the filter intensity, inset on a frame, crop to a preset, add your watermark to every photo or video processed, and save it out to a Files folder, you name it.

For more details on all the capabilities of our Shortcut Actions head on over to our “[Automate your Darkroom Workflow with our new Shortcut Actions](/blog/2021-06-shortcut-actions)” release post from earlier this year.

---

## Big Little Details

At Darkroom we pride ourselves in sweating the details, even the lesser noticed areas of our product get their fair share of attention to improve and innovate on

### RAW Smart Album on Monterey & iOS 15

Easily one of the top requested feature additions that we have finally been able to add. Our library sidebar and album selector now lists a RAW Smart Album that conveniently collects all of your RAW and RAW+ photos in one place.

### Clarity is available on Monterey

Yes! Finally Clarity arrives to the Mac with Monterey. Due to technical constraints on the Mac we only were able to release it on iPhone and iPad first. But now you get to experience Clarity in all its detail on the Mac too. For in depth information about Clarity please head on over to our [Clarity Release Post](/blog/2021-05-clarity).

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-clarity-flowers-split.jpeg"
  alt="Befor and after flower with Clarity"
  wide
/>

### Keyboard Navigation

For many people on the Mac and iPad, using our keyboard shortcuts allows them to quickly navigate through Darkroom. With Monterey Apple made available more tools for us to deepen Darkrooms support for keyboard navigation.

On Monterey and iPadOS 15 we added the ability to navigate between the library sidebar and photo grid using the **Tab** key. The library now also has the ability to be navigated using the arrow keys.

We also added several keyboard shortcuts to make navigating around the app more natural:

*   Use the ⮐ (**Return)** and **Space** key to open and close an asset from the Library.
*   Use the **⌥ (Option)** + **Space** key combination to play/pause video. And use the **Z** key to do a quick zoom, just like the Photos app.

> We know, keyboard shortcuts are hard to remember, even for us. Luckily you can really easily find them in the app. On Mac just go through the Main Menu at the top, and you’ll see the actions with their respective keyboard shortcuts on the right. On iPad, hold down the **⌘** (**Command)** key for a couple of seconds and a menu should appear listing all the actions and their respective keyboard shortcuts.

### Zoom Improvement

You have likely never really noticed zoom as being a feature — you expect it to be there and to just work. Interestingly quite some photo editors either don’t have zoom or lack a lot of functionality that we do have. We consider zoom to be an important feature to really explore and control the edits you make, which is why we spent some time fine tuning it make it sure it works even smoother.

![The new Mac zoom slider in the toolbar](/assets/images/posts/2021-monterey-zoom.gif)

On the Mac we have added a new toolbar control to easily use your mouse to zoom, and see the current zoom percentage. We also added more keyboard shortcuts: **⌘** (**Command) + 1** to zoom to fit, **⌘ (Command) + 0** to zoom to actual pixel size, and the **Z** key to quickly zoom in and out.

---

If there’s something you’d like to see in the future please let us know by leaving it on on our [suggestion board](https://darkroom.nolt.io/), or by sending us an [email](mailto:feedback@darkroom.co) or [tweet](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom) at us. For a full detailed list of all changes please [visit our updates page](/updates/).

As always, we’re very thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you soon.

_The Darkroom Team_

With todays update we bring you even more stability and compatibility with the latest improvements on macOS 12 Monterey and iOS 15.

Darkroom for Monterey & iOS 15


We’ve been busy since last summer: 6 major feature releases (macOS support, ProRAW, Flag & Reject, Clarity, Shortcuts Automation, and Grain Rebuild), and _ten_ smaller updates. Behind the scenes, we grew the team and invested heavily in our technical infrastructure and processes as a company, while also working on exciting new features that aren’t ready to be released just yet.

At the end of the day however, none of that is more important than the core promise of Darkroom: a fast, seamless, beautiful, and powerful photo editing and video processing experience.

Sustainable, long-term businesses operate a little bit like gardens. There are periods of growth, but there are also periods to clean-up to get the app ready for another season of growth, and that’s exactly what today’s update is all about.

For the past 7 weeks, we paused all new feature work as we made our way through the list of frequently reported paper-cuts, and any rough edges in the Darkroom experience. If you’re an active Darkroom editor, you should read this extensive list that we normally don’t share in our release post, hopefully it’ll make you happy. Don’t miss the extra at the end!

---

![New photo loading indicator](/assets/images/posts/1__3jckNYKormGAFDkVlksw5w.jpeg)

### Image Loading

We rebuilt our image loading and generation infrastructure to provide faster image delivery, more accurate results, and improve reliability. This will impact your experience navigating through the app, resulting in a faster and a smoother editing, viewing and navigation experience.

We also updated image loading and prefetching so that you don’t see low-resolution images unnecessarily, particularly when switching quickly between two photos, leading to a more consistently high-quality viewing experience.

_And as part of our previous 5.5 release we improved the loading indicators when viewing a photo to now make an explicit difference between “loading” data locally from storage, and “downloading” data from iCloud._

**Additional improvement we made:**

*   When editing a photo, we now pause library work that might interrupt your interaction with the sliders.
*   All image views in the app now share the same image provider, ensuring they’re all up to date, share resources, and are fast/reliable.
*   Fixes issues where images got stuck loading forever.
*   Fixes issues that caused thumbnails to be blurry in the grid after editing.
*   Fixes rendering glitches when backgrounding the app quickly while editing.
*   We use a lot less memory in our caching layer, ensuring sliders stay responsive and stable.

![RAW + JPG loading settings](/assets/images/posts/1__bW8__nGqlxMBrjjNvCnLkDA.jpeg)

### RAW + JPG Photos

We got a lot of feedback about the default confirmation dialog when switching from JPEG to RAW versions, so we added a new setting to define what version you want to load by default. This allows us to skip asking you every time if you want to change the default when switching.

*   Fixed an issue that could cause the RAW photos to appear too small, and JPEGs to show visual glitches when switching between the two.
*   Fixed an issue that could cause RAW photos to display their dark regions too brightly.
*   The photo badge when viewing or editing the photo now properly reflects whether the RAW or JPG asset was loaded.

### Crop & Transform

Crop is one of our most used tools, but also was one that had quite some rough edges. In our [previous update](https://darkroom.co/updates#55) we already addressed 8 issues to make it more reliable, but we felt we could do even better so put in the effort to address the below issues.

*   Fixes a bug where cropped and/or framed images would stretch if you open the Crop Tool.
*   Improved crop aspect ratio option by making the selection of the “As Shot” and “Free” options sticky across edit sessions.
*   Fixed an issue that caused crop corner controls to not properly settle on the edges if moving quickly past an edge.
*   Fixed an issue that caused crop controls to not respond if your drag gesture was slow to start moving.
*   Fixed a rare issue that could cause the crop controls to disappear!
*   When cropping, we now disable the gesture to dismiss the tools, which could get in your way of cropping.
*   Fixed a lot of alignment and visual layout issues with the Transform tool.

### Photos App Extension

Over the past couple of releases we have worked hard to improve memory consumption in our app in general, and our Photos Extension in particular when using the Grain slider, as well as when entering into the photo extension multiple times.

**_Unfortunately_** _the Clarity slider is still using too much memory and causing the photo extension to crash, so we decided for now to removed it from the Photos Extension until we can address its memory use._

### Exporting

*   When you are exporting, we now pause all other image processing to speed up the export, and provide it as much memory as possible.
*   We now re-use a lot more memory between editing and export, reducing the memory load of the app, and ensuring exporting jobs always have the memory it needs to finish their job.
*   On iPhone, during export, the interface no longer adjusts to device rotation, which helps reduce memory usage and improves stability and reliability of exports.

### Video

*   Improved HDR video export by ensuring it now exports to SDR with the correct colors. When we support end-to-end HDR editing & exporting, we will re-enable HDR exports.
*   Fix a bug where exporting 4K videos with a frame applied would crash.
*   Fixed double-clicking on the video play/pause controls causing you to zoom in or out of the video.
*   Fixed an issue that cause a video to not start playing if navigated to using the photo strip.
*   When a video is updating its thumbnails in the library, we now hide the time badge so it doesn’t overlap the progress indicator.
*   Improved the performance of video thumbnails by optimizing the size and how/when we fetch them.

### **UI Improvements**

*   If the app interface is fully hidden (by tapping on the image to view it full-screen), we now allow you to swipe to dismiss to go back to the library.
*   On iPhone, the top action bar when editing a photo now always shows in black to reduce visual distractions and visually blend with the notch. And will transition to the overall interface theme color when the tools are collapsed. We also made sure to tweak the action bar to better space the action with the different width notches.
*   Improved the Flag & Reject bar when swiping to reveal it when also having the edit tools open, now this won’t force the edit tools to collapse, but the Flag & Reject bar will auto collapse after using them. This way you have a quick way to flag or reject. We also fixed several small layout issues with the Flag & Reject bar.
*   Fixed an issue in which we weren’t properly keeping track the selected cell after editing and navigating back to the library.
*   Fixed our in-app announcement message not auto dismiss if you tapped to read the announcement post.
*   Fixed some layout issues with the batch toolbar, particularly on iPad.
*   When picking a photo to add to an album on Mac, double-clicking on a photo will now add it to that album.
*   Fixed side swipe quick start of multi selection showing in the photo picker.

### **Frame Tool**

*   Fixed an issue that caused some photos to get downscaled when exporting with a frame.
*   Fixed the Frame tool Smart Colors not accurately reflecting the dominant colors in a photo.
*   Fixed the Frame tool resetting the scroll position of the color picker every time a video is paused.

### General Improvements

*   When you change the Blacks or Whites sliders to fix lighting problems, we now maintain those adjustments as you apply filters, allowing you to fix those exposure issues, then add a look without losing your work.
*   Fixed dark tones inverting when a saturation was fully decreased, and the blacks slider was decreased as well.
*   Fixed the Revert action not working properly if the photo was not available locally.
*   Reverted a recent update to our copy/paste logic wherein the aspect ratio of a copied edit was also applied when pasting. This was causing unexpected behavior, and we have better plans to support it in the future.
*   Also reverted a recent change we made to prompt you to replace edits if existing local edits are different from remote edits, which was causing unnecessary confusion.

---

## Three More, Darkroom+ Extras

We added 3 new app icon variants, available only to our [Darkroom+](/darkroom+) subscribers. **Pride** makes the social icon we had to celebrate Pride Month last June available in the app for all to use. **Awake** is an homage to the [Tycho](https://tychomusic.com) album that helped inspire and motivate building the initial version of Darkroom back in 2014. And lastly the **M1** processor/circuit icon is a salute to Apples new amazing chip set that makes Darkroom screaming fast. Making for a new total of 21 icons to chose from to personalize Darkroom!

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__QRAF8JsB3ava4QC8FUHRag.jpeg"
  alt="Three new app icons; Pride, Awake, M1"
  wide
/>

---

Please keep sending in reports of any issue you see, large or small. If there’s something you’d like to see added in the future please let us know by sending us an [email](mailto:feedback@darkroom.co) or tweet at us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom).

As always, we’re very thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you.

_The Darkroom Team_

We’ve been busy since last summer: 6 major feature releases (macOS support, ProRAW, Flag & Reject, Clarity, Shortcuts Automation, and Grain…

Improving Your Darkroom Editing Experience


Today, we’re releasing a change to our grain slider that increases performance, reduces memory-use, and refines the overall look. The grain applied to your existing photos will feel the same, but will look closer to analog film grain and have a more consistent grain structure. This update also allows us to export videos with grain more efficiently, while improving stability and render time.

---

When we originally released our grain tool 2 ½ years ago, we **modeled** our grain tool after **film sensitivity**. When you drag the grain slider from left to right the grain starts off subtle and small, and as you move it to the right it becomes chunkier and more noticeable. The result is a grain tool that's intuitive and simple, but doesn’t hold back your creativity.

There are many technical reasons why you may want to introduce film grain to your photo, but artistically it’s about richness and nostalgia. It introduces an emotionality and a mood to your photo that the often clinical look of tone mapped, de-noised digital digital images of today cannot capture. Head over to our [original grain release post](/blog/2018-11-grain) for more context and tips on when and how to use grain.

## Luminosity Curve

Our original implementation of grain, similar to several other popular editors, uniformly applied grain regardless of how light or dark the underlying region was. This resulted in grain looking like it wasn't mixed with the image, and was layered on top of the image. This caused more noticeable grain in lighter areas of your shots and is not an accurate representation of how film grain behaves.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-grain-mountains.jpeg"
  alt="Black and white lanscape atmospheric perspective, with grain applied"
  wide
/>

Our new grain fixes this by integrating the grain using a luminosity curve, giving you a look closer to the real thing. Analog film grain is most noticeable in underexposed shadow and dark regions because there are not enough photons to activate the grain, while in bright and well exposed areas grain is barely noticeable. Our luminosity curve is modeled exactly that way, resulting in much more natural looking grain, one that is now more subtle in light areas and more pronounced in dark areas.

## Edge Blending

We also changed how we handle edge blending at the extreme of our grain tool slider. Before we used to noticeably blur the image and apply grain on top at the extreme end, which could result in a somewhat unsharp effect. Our new approach is more nuanced, and creates a much nicer rougher edge blending, resulting in sharper looking photos.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-grain-women.jpeg"
  alt="Black and white portrait of a woman, with grain applied"
  wide
/>

## Uniform Grain

Our previous grain implementation had some specific shortcomings in the uniformity department. This time around we went as far as using laser recorded grey of Kodak 5274 film stock as a reference to benchmark and model our own grain generator off of.

Generating full frame of uniform random grain is computationally expensive. To make it performant we only generate small grain patterns, and smartly puzzle them together by randomly rotating and placing them around. All to ensure that you won't ever be able to spot patterns, tiles, edges, lines or pixel clusters that look like dust and scratches, especially when applied to evenly colored regions of your photo or video.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-grain-flowers.jpeg"
  alt="Black and white field of flowers, with grain applied"
  wide
/>

## Video Optimized

Last, but certainly not least, our grain slider is now fully optimized for video. We made sure it's highly performant for both high resolution and high FPS playback. To ensure that grain is more subtle and natural looking when applied to video, we automatically adjust the grain size to be smaller specifically for video, as it tends to be lower resolution than that of photos.

---

## Various other Improvements

In this update we’ve also spent a bunch of time improving the **crop tool**, addressing many **memory issues**, and a large variety of other issues around the app. We still have a lot of work to do, and we are focused on quality and refinement since that is a core value of ours. For a full detailed list of all changes please [visit our updates page](/updates/).

Please send in reports of any issue you see, large or small. If there’s something you’d like to see in the future please let us know by sending us an email or tweet at us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom).

As always, we’re very thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you.

_The Darkroom Team_

Today, we’re releasing a change to our grain slider that increases performance, reduces memory-use, and refines the overall look. The grain…

Improved Grain in Darkroom: Fast, Smooth, and More Natural


We’ve always been very excited about the possibility of integrating Darkroom into shortcuts, but until recently, have been limited by the capabilities of the system. With iOS 14, and now macOS Monterey, we can finally deliver on one of the most exciting use-cases of Shortcuts: Integrate your entire Darkroom editing workflow into a single Shortcut Action.

> For the uninitiated, a shortcut provides a quick way to get things done with your apps with just a tap or by asking Siri. The Shortcuts app from Apple lets you automate a wide variety of things by enabling you to create your own shortcuts by stringing together multiple actions from different apps. [Head to Apple’s Shortcuts user guide](https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios) for more information on how to create your own.

## Processed, Cropped, Framed, & Watermarked Photos Right in Your Shortcut Workflows!

Our new shortcut actions enable you to take photos as an input, edit them, and save them to your library or pass them along to another action. All of this happens in the background with the full power of our app, not a resource-limited extension. You will be able to add a filter, set the filter intensity, inset on a frame, and now also **crop to a preset** and add your watermark to every photo or video processed. From there, you can save it out to a Files folder, upload to Instagram, you name it.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-shortcuts-iphones.jpeg"
  alt="Shortcuts app on iPhone showing Darkroom actions"
  wide
/>

## Crop shortcut action and batch crop

You can now automatically crop your photos to one of our standard aspect ratios. We’ll pick the biggest crop that will center-fit so you can easily run a 1:1 or 9:16 crop automation to prepare your photos for social media. We also brought this ability to Darkroom itself when pasting edits. If you copy edits of a photo, that was cropped using one of our aspect ratio presets, and apply them when you batch paste your edits, we’ll center-crop all those photos as well, making it even easier to have all your photos and videos look consistent.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-shortcuts-crop.jpeg"
  alt="Visualization of how batch crop is applied"
  wide
/>

## New Flag, Reject, and Favorite Actions

We also added several actions to streamline library management, using the [Review features we recently released](/blog/2021-03-flag-reject). These new actions work really well with the Photos app’s existing Actions, unlocking full-featured album and library management of your photo library from anywhere on iOS & macOS.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-shortcuts-ipad.jpeg"
  alt="Shortcuts app on iPad showing Darkroom actions"
  wide
/>

## Ready for macOS Monterey

[Apple just announced macOS Monterey](https://www.apple.com/macos/monterey-preview/) and with it the addition of the Shortcuts app later this year, which was already available on iPhone and iPadOS. We will make sure that our Shortcuts Actions will become available with the release of macOS Monterey.

---

If there’s something you’d like to see in the future please let us know by sending us an email or tweet at us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom). For a full detailed list of all changes please [visit our updates page](/updates/).

As always, we’re very thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you.

_The Darkroom Team_

We’ve always been very excited about the possibility of integrating Darkroom into shortcuts, but until recently, have been limited by the…

Automate your Darkroom Workflow with our new Shortcut Actions


We’re excited to expand our editing capabilities with one of the most requested features: Clarity! After months of research, iteration, and optimization, we promise the wait was worth it.

## What is Clarity?

Clarity adjusts the contrast within the details of your image, without affecting the overall tone of the image.

As you adjust Clarity, the details are either clarified or smoothened, but the whites and blacks remain unaffected, and sharp edges remain sharp.

Want fewer details in a face to smoothen it? Decrease Clarity.
Want more to enhance the drama or texture? Increase Clarity.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-clarity-men.jpeg"
  alt="Three portraits of a man; left -75% clarity, middle is the original, right +75% clarity"
  wide
/>

The Clarity slider is logarithmic, in the range of -50 to +50, the effect is subtle. As you drag towards the edges, the impact of Clarity is expanded. This gives you the ability to either make subtle adjustments for portraits, or go beyond for dramatic landscapes using one single & smart tool.

![The clarity slider, smoothen < > clarify](/assets/images/posts/2021-clarity-slider.jpeg)

> Please note, that **Clarity only works on macOS Big Sur 11.2 and earlier**. This is due to a bug in the latest version of Big Sur which prevented us from shipping Clarity. We’re in contact with Apple about a fix, and will release an update whenever we confirm it works again.

Let’s discuss how this works in practice.

---

## Emphasizing Details

We naturally filter out un-important details to avoid overwhelming our ability to interact with the world. This is biologically useful for making our way around the world safely, but as photographers, we can take advantage of this to define the narrative and direct the eye of the viewer.

Clarity, by increasing contrast in the details, makes them more prominent. In the image of the flower below, it draws your eyes to the texture in the petals, to the creases in the leaves.

This works especially well in photos of nature, landscapes, and animals:

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-clarity-flowers.jpeg"
  alt="Two flowers; left is the original, right +50% clarity"
  wide
/>

## Skin Adjustments

We are also highly attuned to notice the details and features on people’s faces; small changes have a big impact into how you perceive a face. Given how common portrait photos are, they deserve a deeper discussion on their own.

Much like we discussed in the previous section, you could certainly enhance these details if you want to bring attention to the wrinkles in someones face or their facial features. Think documentary photography, or photojournalism (within journalistic reason).

However, digital cameras can be quite good at picking up _too much_ detail. If you want to focus on the person’s expression and their environment, not harsh lighting or other facial features, then **reducing Clarity will smoothen skin, while keeping hair, eyes, and other features sharp and clear.**

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-clarity-women.jpeg"
  alt="Two portraits of a woman; left -50% clarity, right is the original"
  wide
/>

---

## What kind of magic is this?

Under the hood, Clarity is powered by a seriously smart mathematical algorithm called **Fast Local Laplacian Filter**. This algorithm enables us to do two things:

### Pull out only the details from the image

The first big step we take is to calculate which pixels in your photo are details, and which are tone-regions. We do this by generating a [Laplacian Pyramid](http://sepwww.stanford.edu/data/media/public/sep/morgan/texturematch/paper_html/node3.html). In an oversimplified way, we first blur the image, then mathematically subtract it from the original, leaving us with the detail map. We can then operate directly on those details.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-clarity-map.jpeg"
  alt="Two flowers, left is the original, right is the detail map"
  wide
/>

### Adjust pixels relative to their surrounding pixels

Once the details are separated from the image, we can adjust the contrast of each region in the image separately. This is where the “local” in Local Laplacian Filter comes from, and it ensures the edges in the image remain sharp.

![Visualization relative pixel contrast changes](/assets/images/posts/2021-clarity-pixels.jpeg)

Once the details are adjusted, we rebuild the image by re-introducing the color and tone regions.

### Meet the Math

It took quite a few very smart people to figure out all of the above. For the curious, we based our implementation on [this abstract and paper](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2723694). Or watch the video below that also describes what the Fast Local Laplacian Filter does.

<YoutubeEmbed id="OVMEPA-T0Ow" />

---

## Improvements to Portrait Depth editing

With our focus on stability and quality in recent releases, this release also includes big speed improvements to Portrait Depth editing. Changing the blur is much faster, zooming in and making edits is now just as fast regardless of zoom level, and when saving during export, we now preserve the depth mask.

## **Darkroom+** Bonus

We added 3 new app icon variants, available to our [Darkroom+](/darkroom+) subscribers. **Panda** provides a clean black and white version of our current icon. **80’s** harkens back to Apple’s brief foray into apparel in the 1980’s. And the **Swirl** was inspired by Apple’s recent playful and colorful April Spring event. Bringing the total number of icons to choose from to 18!

![Three new app icons; Panda, 80's, and Swirl](/assets/images/posts/2021-clarity-bonus.jpeg)

If there’s something you’d like to see in the future please let us know by sending us an email or tweet at us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom). For a full detailed list of all changes please [visit our updates page](/updates/).

As always, we’re very thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you.

_The Darkroom Team_


Today we are excited to introduce Clarity, a brand new seemingly simple slider tool. This frequently requested tool is the new companion…

Clarity in Darkroom: Enhance Details in Your Photos


You already know that editing photos can be fun. Keeping your library organized however, can feel like work.

Today we’re taking a big step forward to making all this **fun & super fast** with a new [Darkroom+](/darkroom+) workflow to cull and review your photos: **Flag** what you’re interested in, **Reject** what you don’t want to keep. We’ll automatically advance you to the next photo so you can get in the zone and zoom through your latest import.

## How Flag & Reject Fits Into Your Editing Workflow

**On the iPhone**, swipe right on the editing toolbar to reveal the new Review actions. As you tap, Darkroom will automatically advance you to the next photo.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-flag-iphones.jpeg"
  alt="Flag and Reject on iPhone"
  wide
/>

**On the iPad & Mac**, you’ll see new icons for Flag and Reject alongside the existing Favorite and Delete options. Keyboard shortcuts will help you also quickly categorize a photo and move to the next one.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-flag-ipad.jpeg"
  alt="Flag and Reject keyboard shortcuts on iPad, tap-and-hold the command key"
  wide
/>

Now that we know what the new **Darkroom+ Flag and Reject** features are and how to find them and use them, let’s discuss how they fit into your workflow. Remember that this is just a suggestion, and you might find a different workflow that suits you better.

### Step 1: Does it spark joy? 🎉 Flag it.

If you come across a photo that stands out, then flag it. The first time you go through your photos, try not to spend too much time deciding. You’ll get a chance to be more critical later. For now, **focus on** **flagging photos if they have potential.**

### Step 2: Is it just taking up space on your phone? Reject it ✋🏼

**If it’s blurry, or the expression isn’t right or….you forgot why you even captured it, reject it.** Just like before, try to make quick decisions here. Your goal in the first pass is to get through the big list of photos quickly, then you can take your time later with a smaller set of photos.

Rejected photos will dramatically fade out in the grid, which really helps you visually focus only on the good photos. We’ve also made it easy to delete your rejects in one tap, with a reminder when you return in the grid, or the new Rejected smart album that has a delete all option. Poof.

### Step 3: Repeat

Typical Review workflows happen in multiple passes. First make the obvious decisions, clean up your library, then do it again, but be more selective. Eventually, you’ll have the final set. Edit those, favorite or export them, and share away!

---

## iPhone Batch processing gets a lot of love too

We’ve been working hard on making Batch actions more and more powerful, so we’ve added a gesture to let you quickly start selecting photos. **Now, you can just horizontally swipe on any image to start selecting**.

The visual design also gets a refresh, snapping it in line with the iPad & Mac, and because we had to fit two new actions, we decided to make the Actions bar scrollable, so everything can breath a little.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2021-shortcuts-crop.jpeg"
  alt="Visualization of how Batch crop is applied"
  wide
/>

## Finding your Flags and Rejects in Other Apps

When you use our Flagging and Rejecting features for the first time, Darkroom will create a new “Darkroom” Folder in your system photo library that contains 3 albums: Exported, Rejected, and Flagged.

As you perform Flag & Reject actions inside Darkroom, these actions are reflected automatically in those Albums, allowing you to find recently flagged photos anywhere on your phone. And if you have iCloud Photo Library, these albums will also be synced to all your devices!

## Making Hyper-Fast Review Possible

Much of the speed improvement in this update were due to a big infrastructure undertaking that dramatically reduced the amount of data downloaded, memory used, and spinners shown when you navigate through your photo library in the editing interface.

Now, if the editing tools are not visible, we skip the heavy work of downloading and initializing the full-quality image, and instead show you a Smart Preview of the photo. This allows you to navigate through your photo library in Darkroom at the same speed as the native Photos app. In fact, the editing interface is now much more responsive too.

---

Additionally we have been able to resolve a substantial set of other issues with this release. Too much to cover here though. For a full detailed list of all changes please [visit our updates page](/updates/).

If there’s something you’d like to see in the future please let us know by sending us an [email](mailto:feedback@darkroom.co) or [tweet](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom) at us.

As always, we’re very thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you.

_The Darkroom Team_


You already know that editing photos can be fun. Getting to the right photo though, and knowing which one to edit in a big pile of photos…

Manage your growing Darkroom Photo Library with Flag & Reject


Following up last year’s surprisingly popular [10 things you likely didn’t know about Darkroom](/blog/2020-08-ten-things) and your many requests for more tips, we put together a second edition that focuses on workflows in Darkroom. Whether you’re new or a pro, we are sure there’ll be something that will help you do more, in less time.

## 1\. Copy & Paste your Edits in Batch

![Copy and Paste Edits](/assets/images/posts/2021-tips-copy-paste.jpeg)

Have a photo or video that just has the best edits or the perfectly picked filter, and want your other shots to look the same? Skip the hassles of re-applying each edit over and over again by **copying your edits** from the tap-and-hold library menu, History tool, or the Actions (…) menu. Go to your other photos, **and paste your edits onto them**. This also works in the photo grid where you can select lots of photos and paste at once, so you can process many photos and videos rapidly.

> **Bonus Tip:** if you often end up making the same kinds of edits, make it a filter, read how in [tip #3 from](/blog/2020-08-ten-things) our first installment !

## 2\. Tap-and-hold on Live Photo badge for playback

![Live Photo, tap-and-hold badge for playback](/assets/images/posts/2021-tips-live.gif)

The joy of seeing your wonderful shot in motion is why we love Live Photos so much, and why we fully support editing and exporting them! While editing, **Tap the “LIVE”** button at the left top when viewing a Live Photo. Darkroom will process and play back your Live Video with all it’s edits applied. Bringing life to your favorite moments is pretty magical. When you export using “Modify Original”, the live photo will keep its edited video!

## 3\. Turn your iPhone to landscape for an iPad like editing experience

![Darkroom Landscape orientation interface](/assets/images/posts/2021-tips-landscape.jpeg)

When we designed and built our iPad interface, we made sure it would also work well on your iPhone in landscape orientation. For those with the larger iPhones, this brings some of our iPad exclusive functionality to iPhone. In the library grid we show the **Library Sidebar**, when viewing or editing we can show the **Photo Strip**, and when editing in the color tool we show our **Color Histogram**. It makes reviewing collections of photos super fast.

## 4\. Photostrip: manage while editing

![Darkroom Photostrip](/assets/images/posts/2021-tips-photostrip.gif)

Having to constantly switch between the library and the editing interface as you navigate your library slows you down and takes you out of flow. With the photo strip available on all devices in landscape orientation, you can skip & hop through your library while editing, or quickly compare multiple photos to find the one with the perfect expression or the perfect light.

Most importantly, you have **full access to the Photo Actions menu** by long-pressing on a photo in the Photo Strip (or right-clicking using a mouse), meaning you can do complex library management and copy & pasting right from within a single editing session. Zoom zoom zoom!

## 5\. Tap for precise adjustments on slider tracks

![Tap on slider track for adjustments](/assets/images/posts/2021-tips-tap-track.gif)

Sliders are great to quickly make a broad stroke adjustment. But there are times when you want to accurately make fine adjustments, but sliding with your finger and letting go at the right time can be pretty tricky. That’s why, on any slider or curves track, you can **tap on the slider track adjacent to the knob to have the value increase or decrease with steps of 1.** It doesn’t get more precise than that.

## 6\. Rotate from Library

![Rotate menu action in Library](/assets/images/posts/2021-tips-rotate.jpeg)

Making frequent operations ultra fast is what Darkroom is all about. Take Rotate Clockwise for instance. Available through our **library context menu** which you can access by tap-and-holding a photo in the library, or our **Batch actions** you can quickly rotate any (set) of photos without having to go through the more lengthy process of doing this in our Transform tool. And on iPad and Mac, you could even use our “command + r” keyboard shortcut.

## 7\. Frame for Stories

![Inset on Frame from Export](/assets/images/posts/2021-tips-export-frames.gif)

Instagram & Snapchat Stories have a 9:16 aspect ratio, but your photos don’t. If you’re intended destination for your photos is Stories, we introduced a specific tool called [Frames](/updates/three.html#v36) to make sharing to Stories even easier. Not only do we have the dedicated **Frames tool with smart colors**, we also have a **quick option in Export** for you to inset your photo on a story-sized frame, which even works when exporting multiple photos and videos at once!

## 8\. Backup & Restore Filters

![Backup and Restore filters from settings](/assets/images/posts/2021-tips-filters-backup.jpeg)

Hidden in our settings is the option for you to manually backup and restore your custom filters to iCloud. Besides enabling you to safe keep your own carefully created filter creations, this **also enables you to have your filters available on your other devices (iPad or Mac)** as long as you use the same App Store account!

## 9\. Modify Original to sync edits across your devices

![Use Save to sync edits between devices](/assets/images/posts/2021-tips-modify.jpeg)

With the recent release of our Mac app, people have asked us to add the ability for edits to be synced across devices. We love the idea, but to do it right will take us time. Until then, we have a useful workaround that helps you move your edits across devices. When you **export a photo using the “Modify Original” option** we not only save a new image nondestructively with the original, but also save your edits! When iCloud Photo Library syncs your images, we can **recreate those edit on your other devices. Ta-da!**

> **Note:** This only works if your photo has never been edited on the other devices. We do not override/merge existing edits.

## 10\. **Filter strength**

![Filter strength slider](/assets/images/posts/2021-tips-filter-options.gif)

Last but not least, when you select a filter, you can tap on the the big dots ••• that then shows the **filter actions**. This is where you can adjust the strength of a filter using **strength slider**, you’ll be able to see that adjustment in the filter at all times, and you can copy/paste edits preserving the strength adjustment, and even save it to make your own filter with a custom strength!

Following up last year’s surprisingly popular 10 things you likely didn’t know about Darkroom and your many requests for more tips.

Ten Productivity Tips & Tricks for Your Darkroom Workflow #2


With iOS 14.3 finally out, and iPhone 12 Pros making their way into people’s hands, Darkroom is ready as always with native support for ProRAW.

We’re also updating our iPhone & iPad apps with all the new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes we built into [our latest Darkroom macOS release](/blog/2020-11-mac). From now on, the three platforms will move forward together.

## ProRAW for iOS 14.3: Have your cake and eat it too

_tl;dr. ProRAW gives you the convenience of processed JPEGs with the editing range of a RAW photo, without either of their flaws. The only negative is the file size._

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__e9BCrZhREiArC__ZpvQEkrQ.jpeg"
  caption="Left: no tone mapping. Middle: default tone mapping, matching the Camera and Photos apps. Right: fully edited photo."
  wide
/>

In a greatly simplified sense, when you take a photo on the iPhone, the Camera app captures raw information from the scene. This form is rich with detail and high in dynamic range, but it’s flat and generally dark. RAW images are a direct representation of that scene information. RAW files are optimized for preserving details & editing latitude, not getting you a usable image.

Using the stock Camera app, iOS then takes this RAW photo and processes it through a magic box of HDR, Night Mode, Deep Fusion, AI…the works. When it’s done, you get a beautifully processed JPEG, with a small file size.

However, if you don’t like what the magic box did to your photo, you’re out of luck. The raw data is thrown away at capture-time. Worse, your photo is now compressed. When you’re editing in an app like Darkroom, if you stretch the colors too much, you’ll start noticing nasty blocks and artifacts show up.

Alternatively, you can shoot in RAW and keep all that high quality data, but you give up everything that magic box was doing for you. As a result, the RAW photo doesn’t match the processed preview you saw when capturing, the file is large, and it’s time consuming to edit.

The choice between JPEG convenience vs RAW flexibility has generated debate among photographers since the onset of digital photography.

Until ProRAW.

### No More Compromises: ProRAW is Here!

Once you [enable ProRAW in Settings](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965), you can start capturing photo like a regular mobile photographer. **Remember to make sure your highlights are not clipped**. You don’t need to make special accommodations for shooting ProRAW.

So what makes ProRAW different?

Just like before, iOS captures the RAW image and all the information that the magic box needs to do its magic. After spitting out a beautiful JPEG, **it doesn’t throw away the source material** — Neither the RAW image nor the materials that the magic box needs to do its work.

In Darkroom, when you open a ProRAW photo, we first prepare the RAW image, then most of our exposure-correction sliders do their work, and THEN we pass it to the magic box. This results in a beautiful, tone-mapped 12-bit image that the rest of our pipeline processes for color grading.

This allows us to provide you a photo with all the convenience of JPEG processing, but without paying the cost of JPEG compression. Best of all, it’s still a RAW photo, so you get the full editing latitude you expect, but without the inconvenience!

_p.s. The file can be as big as 30MB. That’s the only problem._

### ProRAW in Darkroom

Darkroom is now ProRAW-aware. When we notice a ProRAW photo, we’ll indicate it with a new badge, and you’ll notice a new **Tone Map** slider.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__zyQ0__72q2duzffyK__2mkQw.jpeg"
  caption="Left: tone mapping on full can make the photo look flat or washed out as it preserves detail. Right: reducing tone mapping a bit can bring back contrast."
  wide
/>

In the context of RAW development, local tone mapping enables you to boost the shadows and recover highlights while preserving details. However, if overdone, it can result in the “HDR effect”, which can make your photos look flat.

The Tone Map slider allows you to control the strength of this effect. By default, we leave it at 100% so your ProRAW images in Darkroom match your preview in the Photos app. You can disable all local tone mapping by moving the slider down all the way to 0%, increasing contrast, and making your photos look more natural, although depending on the shooting conditions, your photo may be very dark.

In our own testing, we found ourselves often leaving the Tone Map to 100%, but sometimes found that 60–70% preserves much of the highlight & shadow recovery we need, without introducing the intense local contrast/HDR effects.

Our dear friends at Halide have written [an amazing article](https://blog.halide.cam/understanding-proraw-4eed556d4c54) demonstrating the building blocks of RAW, JPEGs, and what makes ProRAW different. If you’re interested in the nitty-gritty details, be sure to give it a read.

We’re so excited to see what you create using ProRAW.

---

## Bringing Darkroom 5 to the iPhone & iPad

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__BuaTNINt59AZwoooqqXD5w.jpeg"
  wide
/>

Along with the addition of ProRAW support, this update brings to the iPhone & iPad months of hard work that went into Darkroom 5's macOS Big Sur update.

Practically every part of the app has been touched, improved, iterated on, and updated to support the Mac. Best of all, being a Universal app, all the work we did to extend keyboard and mouse support carries through on the iPad. This also extends to context menus, multi-window support, drag-and-drop, and more.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__vQPh__R4JZJhT4Gfkw1YVVQ.jpeg)

You’ll also notice the app feels more responsive as you navigate between photos, and most importantly, images render consistently at a high resolution, rather than switching to low res previews when you zoom, scroll, or navigate through the app.

There are too many individual bug fixes to mention them all here (most notably, we fixed the rendering regressions for Portrait photos on iPhone 12 and iOS 14), so head on over to our [updates page](https://darkroom.co/updates) to see a full list.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__55lwspAJTfzEG8c2H1hPCQ.jpeg"
  wide
/>

---

Despite the challenges of this year, we’re so thankful for your continued loyalty and support and can’t wait to share with you all the exciting stuff we have coming down the line in 2021.

_The Darkroom Team_

This a two-for-one update. First, we’re adding support for ProRAW with a new “Tone Map” slider. Second, we’re bringing all the bug fixes…

ProRAW vs JPEG vs RAW in Darkroom (And a whoooole lot more)


**Darkroom is now available on the Mac as a universal app with support for the new** [**M1**](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-unleashes-m1/) **Macs, as well as Intel Macs running Big Sur.**

With this update, Darkroom now provides a complete powerful workflow for mobile photographers, all the way from editing on-the-go, to the Mac at home.

Everything is updated to reflect the [new macOS Big Sur aesthetic](https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/overview/whats-new-in-macos/) with native components like the new translucent sidebar and native window toolbars. We also optimized all interactions for mouse, trackpad, & keyboard input, sparing no detail in making Darkroom feel at home on the Mac.

**Your existing [Darkroom+](/darkroom+) subscription unlocks everything on the Mac at no extra cost**, and new subscribers get access to everything on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

_Please do note that today’s update is only available on the Mac App Store. We’re working hard on getting Darkroom updated on iPhone & iPad soon!_

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__BuaTNINt59AZwoooqqXD5w.jpeg"
  wide
/>

## Powerful management & editing workflows, for today’s cloud-based photo libraries

Many photo editing apps on the Mac are from a bygone era where images live in folders on file systems, and require a manual to use. Adobe calls this version of Lightroom “Classic”. Mobile photographers however have libraries that live in the Cloud and need fast, efficient, and safe access to their photos. Darkroom on the Mac bridges the power of classic photo editing applications, with the ease-of-use and convenience of iCloud Photo Library.

Features and sliders alone don’t make for a joyful experience though. You need to dig deeper to spark joy. Being a mobile-first app, we have a lot of experience doing that. We’ve learned how to remove all the cruft around photo editing. We’re bringing all those lessons to the Mac with our no-import editing workflow and our easy to use, yet powerful editing tools. We wanted to go far beyond the basics though, and create a app that truly feels native to the Mac. To that end, we set three core principles:

*   **Respect the platform:** The Mac is the platform with a rich heritage, and we pay our due respect. The best apps offer nuanced mouse and keyboard support, have deep drag and drop integration, and provide access to the Finder. The Mac is a platform of flexibility and depth.
*   **Streamline the edit and management experience:** Importing photos takes time and effort and creates a duplicate library on your Mac. Worse, you may have to pay twice for storage. Our deep iCloud Photo Library integration means that from launch, all your photos are instantly available. iCloud support is deeply integrated at all levels of the app, and you can favorite, hide, delete, and export without creating a shadow library.
*   **Be familiar**: Designing mobile interfaces for the past 12 years has taught us that if you can’t find or use a feature it’s worthless. Pro-grade tools have often lagged behind consumer tools in design and usability, but we believe that’s a false tradeoff. The best app should be familiar, recognizable and friendly. **_We have made pro-grade photo editing as fast and easy as browsing photos,_** _and our Apple Design Award recognizes that achievement._

With all that said, let’s see how we did! Here it is in all its glory!

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1____rswTtN2E7QpIqdJ8eTN__g.png"
  wide
/>

## An Updated Library

The most obvious change visually to Darkroom for Mac is the library view using the new, native macOS Big Sur sidebar, and window toolbars. This, alongside drag & drop support, folder support, and mouse support, means you can perform complex library management right within Darkroom, taking advantage of native Mac behaviors.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__y1mZKtKN__mBxMF9jktK__wQ.gif"
  caption="Our new sidebar now supports folders, helping you keep your library organized. In an upcoming update, we’ll let you create and manage your folders too!"
/>

We also adapted the library interface to prioritize batch processing. It’s no longer a separate mode, so it’s much more efficient to quickly select a group of photos, and perform complex editing & management tasks on them.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__6dOvI4pQfoHuJdjFBUg1Dw.gif"
  caption="Batch processing is super efficient and up-front with Darkroom on the Mac."
  wide
/>

### Keyboard Shortcuts, Menus, and Touch Bar Actions!

We’ve also expanded & updated our keyboard shortcuts to make jumping around your library even easier. Use the Mac menu system to explore the possibilities and learn the keyboard shortcuts. It works really well for complex batch processing using only the keyboard. We even went so far as to add Touch Bar support, to make managing and processing accessible at the touch of your finger, even when editing.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__7qNbxjHe7K5WaNwwnQ2pEw.jpeg"
  caption="Touch Bar actions keep the most important management features at your fingertips, always."
  wide
/>

## A Brand Update

Every major version of Darkroom has come with a brand update, and version 5 is no different. We’ve loved all our brand iterations, but as Darkroom matures and grows, and as the world changes around us we like to adapt. With this release we embraced the new, more lifelike rendering, in the style of macOS Big Sur. Our new default icon now uses an “aqua-esque” glass texturing, in a nod to the rich heritage of Mac icon design.

We also added a few additional variants for our [Darkroom+](/darkroom+) subscribers. The default icon is boldly colored, we also still have a light and dark variant, along with fun Metal and 1-bit options to celebrate major stylistic eras of the Mac.

_Note: changing the app icon from within the app is not available in the Mac app. We created a_ [_page detailing how to achieve it manually_](https://darkroom.co/help/appicons.html)_!_

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__55lwspAJTfzEG8c2H1hPCQ.jpeg"
  wide
/>

### All new symbols

As part of our brand update we also reviewed and redrew every single icon in our app. We made sure to update our icons to visually pair seamlessly with [Apple’s SF Symbols](https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/sf-symbols/overview/) effort. And as a result Darkroom now looks and feels even more fresh & friendly.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__v__BlmSxZWfT8uZEndtfKsQ.jpeg"
  wide
/>

Darkroom on Mac is a major step forward in our journey, bringing Darkroom to all Apple’s major platforms. We have an enormous amount of work ahead of us in the coming years, and we appreciate your support and feedback.

If there’s something you’d like to see in the future please let us know by sending us an email or tweet at us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom). For a full detailed list of all changes please [visit our updates page](https://darkroom.co/updates/).

As always, we’re very thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you.

_The Darkroom Team_

The same Apple Design Award-winning app you know and love is now tailored & optimized for its new home on the Mac.

Darkroom Comes to the Mac


These are our favorite tips and tricks on power features we have carefully added to Darkroom over the past 5 years. These have often gotten lost in our big releases, but these little details have a big impact on the overall workflow that makes our app so uniquely fast, easy, and intuitive to use. And even helped us [win an Apple Design Award](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-honors-eight-developers-with-annual-apple-design-awards/)! Whether you’re new to Darkroom or a pro, we are sure there’s something in here that will surprise you.

## 1. Tap-and-hold on the photo to see the original

In order to make edits, it quickly becomes paramount that you can see what your starting point was at any point in your editing process. It’s important to see how far you pushed your brightness, or the over all color adjustments. That’s why whenever you are viewing or editing a photo or video you can simply tap-and-hold on a photo to see what the original looked like.

![](/assets/images/posts/2020-tips-taphold.jpeg)

## 2. Swipe a photo down to get back to the Library

Being able to move through Darkroom one handed has always been an explicit goal for us. Being able to quickly swipe down a photo while editing means you can browse, open, edit, and close with just one finger, your thumb! Bonus tip: you can even swipe left/right to quickly navigate between photos!

![](/assets/images/posts/2020-tips-swipe-down.jpeg)

## 3. Create your own filter

Yes, Darkroom comes with a large variety of creative filters ready for use. But you can also create your own! All you have to do is:

1.  Make some awesome edits to your photo.
2.  Head to the Filters tool.
3.  Tap the “Create Filter” button.
4.  Give it a short name.

Et voilà, now you have your own filter that you can easily reuse with just a tap. Not only will the photos you share look more consistent, but you’ll also edit and share a lot faster!

![](/assets/images/posts/2020-tips-filter-create.jpeg)

## 4. Double-tap on a slider knob to reset

This is a very quick little trick. When you want to undo or reset any slider edit. Just double-tap on the slider handle in question and we will reset the edit to 0 for you. That’s it.

![](/assets/images/posts/2020-tips-slider-doubletap.jpeg)

## 5. Tap-and-hold on slider label to temporarily hide edits

This a great shortcut to figure out what edit is causing which effect in your photo, and instead of sliding around, or resetting the edit and having to put it back, tap-and-holding the label temporarily hides the edit until you let go.

![](/assets/images/posts/2020-tips-tap-label.jpeg)

## 6. Edit using the Histogram

Less of a trick, and more of a tip. On iPhone we hide the histogram by default, as it will display on top of your photo, and there is a bit of a learning curve to understanding and using it. But on iPad we always show it. Knowing about, and taking the time to work with our histogram will help you more easily spot and fix problems with your photos objectively, in a way that eye-sight alone isn’t suited for. More specifically, histograms help you fix exposure and color problems in your image. Head to our [in-depth release post on the Histogram](/blog/2019-08-histogram) to learn all the basics.

![](/assets/images/posts/2020-tips-histogram.jpeg)

## 7. Tap-and-hold menu in the Library and Photo-strip

Did you know you didn’t have to open a photo to do a wide variety of actions? You can actually just tap-hold on a photo in your Library photo grid (or on iPad our Photostrip, or right click on the iPad trackpad) to access the menu. From here you can favorite, delete, hide, export, reset, revert, copy edits, view metadata, or add to an album with just two quick taps!

![](/assets/images/posts/2020-tips-menu.jpeg)

## 8. Batch process your photos

This likely sounds more complicated than it actually is. All you have to do is:

1.  Pick a photo with edits that you like.
2.  Copy its edits from the History tool, the (…) menu, or the Library Actions menu (See tip #7).
3.  Tap the “Batch” button in library (top right), and paste those copied edits on photos you would also like to have those same edits.

See, that isn’t so complicated, now is it! But it is a huge productivity win. Especially if you went on a family weekend outing and have some great shots you wanna share quickly. Combine that with creating your own filters and you will fly through editing and sharing volumes of quality photos.

![](/assets/images/posts/2020-tips-batch.jpeg)

## 9. Manage your photos with Albums

Albums are a fundamental tool of any editing workflow. Using them properly can dramatically speed up your work whether you use it to manage family trips, working on large professional projects, maintaining an ongoing photography series, or simply sharing stories. They are particularly helpful to use when you are using multiple different apps to edit your photos, by using an app like [TouchRetouch](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/touchretouch/id373311252) for example. Or to cull your photos and videos selection down. We specifically love using Emoji in our album names to make them stand out! Head to our [in-depth release post on the Album management](/blog/2020-06-manage-albums) to learn more.

![](/assets/images/posts/2020-tips-albums.jpeg)

## 10. Edit multiple photos and videos at once on iPad with Spaces

Last, but certainly not least. On Darkroom for iPad you can open multiple Spaces (windows) of Darkroom side-by-side. The iPad Split View and Slide Over modes unlock a whole new set of editing possibilities, letting you work exactly how you want in even more intuitive ways. To do this, simply tap-and-hold on a photo in the Library and drag it to the left or right edge of the screen to open an additional editing space. Or tap on “Open in New Space” option in the menu that appears. This enables you to also open the same photo in two spaces side by side. Or even to open two Darkroom libraries side by side.

![](/assets/images/posts/2020-tips-newspace.jpeg)

These are our favorite tips and tricks on features we have added to Darkroom over the past 5 years.

10 things you likely didn’t know about Darkroom


We are humbled to announce that [Apple has awarded Darkroom their prestigious Apple Design Award](https://developer.apple.com/design/awards/2020/) for Outstanding Design and Innovation. The team is over the moon to be recognised for the years of hard work and passion we have all poured into Darkroom!

> This comprehensive and surprisingly powerful photo editor comes loaded with all the granular controls and moody filters you’ve come to expect — with an elegant interface that truly lights the way. Its simple Curves editor lets photographers of all levels fine-tune light and color in an intuitive and artful way. Pros will appreciate Darkroom’s ability to batch-edit images, open RAW files, and create custom filters. In the crowded world of photo-editing apps, Darkroom shines bright.

During histories first online World Wide Developers Conference (due to COVID-19) the Apple Design Award was presented on the opening day, as millions watched online. The Apple Design Awards focusses on best-of-the-best applications and developers with an eye on excellence in innovation, design and technical achievement, making it one of the most sought after awards in the design and tech world.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/about/dr-ada.jpg"
  alt="Apple Design Award, aluminum cube"
  wide
/>

This award means the world to us! This shiny solid little aluminium cube will always remind us that we should persevere. The business of software is extremely competitive, building an app like Darkroom requires amazing people, resilience, heaps of stubbornness, and a lot of time. We are very thankful to Apple for the recognition that very few receive, about 5-10 every year out of the 4.5 million apps in the App Store.

Apple also did an [interview with Majd about the design of Darkroom](https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=nxnjx66e). LAstly, we had some fun and recorded the teams reaction during the unboxing of our award.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Unboxing the Apple Design Award <a href="https://t.co/GdkqECpZ9c">pic.twitter.com/GdkqECpZ9c</a></p>&mdash; Darkroom (@usedarkroom) <a href="https://twitter.com/usedarkroom/status/1278378242336940032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 1, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

_The Darkroom Team_


Last week Apple recognised Darkroom with their prestigious Apple Design Award for Outstanding Design and Innovation.

Darkroom wins a '20 Apple Design Award


To the Darkroom Community,

Before we begin with the details of today’s update, we’d like to address the protests against racism, police violence and calls for reform ringing out across the United States:

The Darkroom team unequivocally supports the calls for justice for the families of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and the calls for comprehensive police reform.

The American education system does a poor job of representing the true history of Black Americans. Those of us with privilege have a duty to educate ourselves. Jenae Butler has generously shared [a slide deck](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ltJmjs20m1rQGXPesYRi7zLq35mgWELQO8oFOrD1UlM/edit#slide=id.g87cb28f580_0_32) on how to be effective allies, and has also shared [resources to read and learn from](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/standing-united-resources-jenae-butler-1e/).

---

Our founder Majd, is donating 100% of the sales from his book, [Displaced: Stories from the Syrian Diaspora](https://syriandiaspora.com) to the [Equal Justice Initiativ](https://eji.org/issues/policing-in-america/?fbclid=IwAR1W2DDb8n7FF0aDQ4i6omoVKhDys5eUB38zJ2zjTG8KNv0wL3UyAQ5ltFI)e, an organization working since 1989 on incarceration- and police-reform.

Darkroom will be matching the first $10,000 in donations 1:1.

[**Order your copy of Displaced here, and 100% of your money will go towards ending police violence in America.**](https://syriandiaspora.com)

---

## Manage your Albums in Darkroom

Today’s update introduces comprehensive library and album management features. We’ve spent years optimizing your editing workflow by eliminating the import process and allowing you to navigate your library easily. Now, we’re bringing that same philosophy to library organization: Faster browsing, and easier management than ever before. This is just the start of a new phase of feature development for Darkroom.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2020-albums-add.jpeg"
  caption="Note in the right image that once you have navigated to an album on iPhone there now is a “…” menu with all the album management options."
  wide
/>

When browsing any of your albums, you can use the Batch tool to select multiple photos. At the bottom of the screen, a row of actions will appear and new to that list is **“Add To”**. Tap it to move the selected photos to any existing album or create a new one right there.

To create a new album, simply navigate to the album picker by tapping on the “Recents” button, and tap the big **“+”** button to pick a name for the album. Once in an album, you can add photos to that album, rename the album, or delete the album altogether. This can all be done from the **“…”** button near the album name. This makes album management insanely easy and fast.

## Suggested Album Workflows

Albums are a fundamental tool of any editing workflow. Understanding how to use them properly can dramatically speed up your work whether you’re working on large projects, maintaining an ongoing photography series, or sharing stories.

### Multiple-app editing flows

If you’ve ever captured a bunch of photos then edited & exported your favorites, you’ve likely felt the frustration of having to find those edited photos in your library all over again in another app. This is the primary way that albums can help.

_Here’s a scenario:_ You’ve captured many videos in the Camera app. Then you go do Darkroom to navigate through them, pick your favorites, edit them, and export them. You can now easily create a new album just with those videos. When you then move to [LumaFusion](https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/lumafusion/id1062022008) to sequence them into a movie, you’ll be able to find them organized in a folder right in your photo library.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2020-albums-ipad.jpeg"
  wide
/>


### ✅ Culling your photos & videos

Another way to use albums is for photo culling. This comes in handy when you want more than just a Favorite to identify images. One way to do this is by creating albums with emoji names. In our case we created 3-star ⭐️⭐️⭐️, and a 2-flag 🚩🚩 albums to help pick the best images in a set. This will be reflected in your library and all other apps.

## Shines on iPad

Album management really shines on the iPad. You can use the trackpad on your new iPad Magic Keyboard, or use any bluetooth mouse, or your finger to instantly drag a photo from the grid, and drop it on one of your albums. In Batch mode, you can select multiple photos and videos, and drag them all at once to a new or existing album.

Also note that we made sure to add all these album management actions to the touch and hold context menus as well. And we made opening a new space even easier by adding a content menu item for that too.

---

As we hope you expect by now, all the album organization, creation, renaming, and deletions you make in Darkroom will be instantly reflected in the Photos app and vice versa, available to all apps on your phone, and synced to all your devices using iCloud Photo Library.

We hope these new tools help you bring clearness to your workflow. This is just the first step we’re taking to let you wrangle your photo library within Darkroom. If there’s something you’d like to see in the future please let us know by sending us an [email](mailto:feedback@darkroom.co) or tweet at us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom).

We’re thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you.

_The Darkroom Team_


Today’s update introduces comprehensive library and album management features. We’ve spent years optimizing your editing workflow by…

Manage your Albums in Darkroom


Today we’re launching app-wide support for processing videos in Darkroom, available to all our existing and new subscribers. This is one of the most impactful changes in our history, and it is made possible by the [new rendering engine](/blog/2020-03-new-renderer) we recently released.

Videos in Darkroom feel as lightweight as photos. They animate, zoom, crop, autoplay and loop, and every edit is made in realtime. By eliminating all the complexities involved in the traditional video processing, you can now expand the range of your visual stories with little time and effort.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__yG694tUVHMMrP7SYw65Nhg.jpeg"
  wide
/>

If you’re already familiar with Darkroom, you can skip this section. But if you’re wondering why you should care, allow us to tell you what we’re all about.

## What makes Darkroom different?

We’ve spent years building the most efficient mobile photo editing workflow, designed to reflect the way we capture photos today, and we’re bringing that to videos today.

We’re deeply integrated into iCloud Photo Library, so there’s no import step or separate a library to manage. You don’t have to be afraid of processing those 30 videos waiting in your library. You can comfortably navigate it without being forced to commit/discard your edits, then share your favorites as a cohesive set, all at once.

Our editing tools are designed to be easy to use for casual photographers, but flexible enough for professional users. There’s an enormous amount of flexibility and power beneath our friendly, approachable interface.

## Suggested Video Workflows

### **Casual Users**

![](/assets/images/posts/1__kx5BQN6uQCNhHgr3wy6AyA.png)

If you’re capturing videos in a casual context for social media, we recommend using either the built-in Camera app, or one of the excellent third-party apps that work seamlessly with Darkroom like the [Moment Pro Camera](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/moment-pro-camera/id927098908) app.

Capture as many videos as you need, then jump straight into Darkroom and they’ll be ready for you. You can navigate through them just like in the Photos app, and edit your favorite one.

When you export you can use **Modify Original** to export your edits without creating a copy in your library. This is non-destructive, any edits you make in Darkroom can always be reverted. Our **Frame** **tool** works really well for getting a perfectly formatted border on your images in the perfect aspect ratio. Give it a try!

### Pro Users

![](/assets/images/posts/1__d4l4fYSxRppnsgQl__0d85g.png)

In a more professional context that requires more specialized tools, we recommend capturing videos using the excellent [FiLMiC Pro](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/filmic-pro-video-camera/id436577167) app, then using Darkroom to cull down the media to a few selects, color correcting & grading them, then using [LumaFusion](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lumafusion/id1062022008) to sequence the videos into a final product.

In this workflow, you can **Favorite** your chosen media to quickly identify them in LumaFusion. Our **Batch Paste & Export** make quick work of editing & exporting all your videos at once. Finally, the **Modify** **Original** export option non-destructively exports without creating duplicate copies in your library.

---

## Cinematic Filters [Darkroom+](/darkroom+)

While we were at it we couldn’t resist developing a brand new set of Cinematic filters for all your videos. These filters are designed to instantly give your videos a more cinematic look.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__omRhyLQbU11RsI__FDQq4VQ__2x.jpeg"
  wide
/>

*   **C100** — a pure and bold play on the cinematic [teal and orange color combination](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsAs2hNAr5M). Shadows get a teal tint, highlights get an orange tint. Call it the Harry Potter look if you wish.
*   **C200** — a moodier, more faded version of the C100 filter. Faded blacks and whites, and a slightly more desaturated tone. This works particularly well in urban environments.
*   **C300** — a warmer, brighter look. Good for sunny days, beach days, happy days. Remember those?
*   **C400** — a bold black and white look inspired by the very first [orthochromatic photographic](https://www.musicbed.com/blog/filmmaking/cinematography/breaking-down-the-cinematography-of-the-lighthouse/) film material, which were most sensitive to ultraviolet light and blue light. It heavily darkens skin, and brightens skies.
*   **C500** — a film noir inspired look, a more subtle and soft black and white, that borrows it’s foundation from orthochromatic film.

---

## App-Wide Enhancements

Our changes do not only extend to the editing interface however, we updated the entire app to better work with videos.

The Metadata Viewer is also rebuilt to provide a faster, more refined loading experience, and making it more visual by adding icons for photo metadata. Now also with support for video metadata. You’ll be able to inspect the bitrate, file size, audio & video information, and more.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__AbQd8Pm76sv4BM85E5pVYw.jpeg"
  caption="We even updated our metadata view to be a bit more compact and visual, check the icons :)"
  wide
/>

When exporting video, we provide support for H.264 and HEVC encoding at various bitrates. All bitrates are relative to the original video. The higher the bitrate, the higher the quality, but the larger the file size. All other export options are also supported for videos. This includes removing location metadata, adding watermarks, and copyright.

We also updated our export progress dialog to handle the much longer export sessions, and provide you with more detail on the progress and time remaining. The screen will no longer sleep if left untouched while exporting, and you can now cancel a running export if it’s taking too long.

---

As you may have noticed, we are also **rebranding our new subscription package to Darkroom+**. If you are an existing subscriber, this change does not affect you in any way, it’s just a name-change. For new customers however, we hope this provides a much more concise brand that allows us to communicate more simply and consistently the value we provide.

## What’s Next?

This is just the first step in our video journey, and we wanted to keep it simple and focused. We’d love to hear what you think, what you’d like to see next, so please send us an [email](mailto:feedback@darkroom.co) or tweet at us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom).

In our previous announcements, we promised you a lot more frequent updates with a lot of features you’ve been asking for for a long time. We are committed to fulfilling this promise.

We’re thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything else we have in store for you.

---

As a final note, we’d like to say thank you to Jarod, the newest member of the Darkroom team, for building the early foundation of this release. It would not have happened without you!

_The Darkroom Team_

Today we’re launching app-wide support for editing videos in Darkroom, available to all our existing and new subscribers. This is one of…

Video Processing Comes to Darkroom


We’re releasing a major **rebuild of Darkroom’s rendering engine** that will dramatically improve the performance, stability, and reliability of your photo editing experience.

Portrait editing is more reliable and accurate, RAW photos are more stable, and every slider, transition, and interaction is smoother.  
This is the result of a yearlong investment that touched much of the app. Although there aren’t any new features, every existing feature is better and faster.

## Why take this on?

In 2015 we supported a single image type on two iPhones with one engineer. Making Darkroom fast, stable, and reliable was a manageable task given the simplicity. Since then, we dramatically increased the number of devices, platforms, and image types we support.

We couldn’t have predicted this growth in complexity up front. Some technical decisions were made early on that made supporting the full weight of advanced mobile photography a challenge. If you ever encountered stutters, crashes, or jitters while editing, you know what we’re talking about. This is counter to our core values of delivery the highest quality editing experience possible.  
  
We decided that the time had come to modernize the app’s infrastructure. We got back to basics, brought on graphics specialists to help us dig deep into the world of Metal to build a fine-tuned rendering engine optimized for Portrait and RAW photos, and delivers an unparalleled editing experience.  
   
Throughout the entire app’s experience, you’ll notice the app respond faster and more predictably, and with smoother transitions. Darkroom now uses dramatically less memory, providing a much more responsive and reliable editing experience

---

## Portrait Photos

Portrait images now load faster, and our blur pipeline is much more performant and accurate, matching the Photos app in its rendition, while retaining all our depth editing features  
   
We also made the _Blur_ slider consistent across all devices and moved it so it’s always available, regardless of whether you have the _Foreground_ or _Background_ selected.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__fP51WJtvp17e7vBz__N06DA.jpeg"
  caption="The blur slider is now always visible, and we even added the aperture f-stop value."
  wide
/>

_Pro-tip_: If you’re seeing some unexpected results with the blur, try long-pressing on the _Portrait_ badge in the top left of the photo to view the raw depth image. You can even hold it down while you adjust the _Depth_ slider to view the impact of your changes.

_Note:_ As part of our work to deliver the highest quality portrait blur effect, we decided to eliminate the “Portrait” and “Portrait HD” distinction. We now always use all available depth maps to produce a single high quality blur.

## RAW Photos

For the past year, RAW editing stability has been our top reported issue across all platforms. Fixing it required a massive, yearlong effort, but that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. Starting now, the entire RAW editing experience is revamped end-to-end to be much faster, smoother, and more stable.  
   
We’ve made the transition into and out-of RAW images much lighter and more smooth, improved the performance of all editing operations, and added support for pixel-level zoom on all RAW images. Shadow recovery is also improved; RAW images no longer appear as dark as they used to in Darkroom.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__LAHV7B4Yj__MdUv2pccCuCQ.jpeg"
  caption="Darkroom’s new engine supports a 5x deeper zoom. Go ahead and pixel peep!"
  wide
/>

_Note:_ Although the quality and performance of the RAW engine itself is vastly improved, we still have some more work to do to refine the recovery range of our Highlights/Shadows sliders as you drag them to the edge of their range. This is something we’re actively working on, and we’ll have more to share when it’s ready.

## Library Navigation

These improvements also extend to the rest of the app experience. We’ve dramatically improved the performance of scrolling through your photo grid. You’ll no longer see black tiles as you quickly scroll through your library.   
   
We’ve also updated the logic for generating edited thumbnails to make them faster and much more accurate. Now, Portrait and RAW photos will look pixel-accurate once you make any edits. Try pasting edits while in batch mode and watch them all cascade and populate dropping any frames.   
   
We’ve also improved the experience and performance of switching between albums.  
  
_Photo Grid Pro Tip:_ If you have a lot of assets in your library that need to be downloaded from iCloud, pasting edits is a really fast way to trigger the iCloud download on many photos before your editing session. This is particularly helpful if you’re capturing a lot of photos on your phone, but editing them later on your iPad.

---

## How is all this done?

We’ve traditionally relied heavily on Apple’s image processing toolkit to provide the foundation of Darkroom’s editing experience. This served us really well in our early days since it meant we could deliver a pro-level editing experience quickly, with a single engineer. However, as our feature complexity grew, we started stepping beyond what the toolkit is built to designed to handle.  
   
For example. If you open an 88MB RAW file and zoom in, we need to process _only_ the visible part of the image to keep performance fast. But if we also have a Histogram, we’ll need to also process the entire image every frame. Being able to process the image at these two different resolutions simultaneously turns out to be a non-trivial task at 120 frames per second.  
   
Moreover, as the complexity of the rendering pipeline grows, it can start affecting the responsiveness of the interface. Ensuring that the rendering pipeline can operate independently from the app’s interface can also be challenging.  
   
Our new rendering engine is built right on top of Metal, Apple’s low-level graphics engine which games, photo, and video apps are all built on top of. It gives us freedom, but meant we had to build our own toolkit on top. We had to build our own caching layer, our own scheduling system, and our own processing and rendering systems to ensure we never allocate too much memory, starve out the graphics system from updating the interface, or do more work that is necessary.  
   
It’s a dynamic rendering system that responds to the capability of your device as you edit. It starts out high resolution, and will reduce the editing resolution while you’re interacting with the app to ensure everything stays fast and responsive.

Our work here isn’t done, and we’ll continue to iterate on this in the coming months.

## What’s Next?

In our announcement when we switched to Subscriptions, we promised you a lot more frequent updates, with a lot of features you’ve been asking for for a long time. This is one step, but in many ways, it’s the most important. This new infrastructure provides us the memory, performance, and technical headspace to start tackling much more challenging projects that have been out of reach for us.   
   
Although this version has been a huge team endurance effort by [Majd Taby](http://twitter.com/jtaby) and [Igor Lipovac](http://twitter.com/LipovacJeTu), we owe a big big **thank you** to [Andrew Pouliot](http://twitter.com/andpoul) for his help in building the initial version of the engine, and his continued support throughout the process. Couldn’t have done it without you!  
   
Until soon,  
_The Darkroom Team_

We’re releasing a major rebuild of Darkroom’s rendering engine that will dramatically improve the performance, stability, and reliability…

A New Rendering Engine for Darkroom


Today’s release of Darkroom includes two new features that people have been asking for for a long time: **Export Watermark**, and an expanded **App Icon Picker**. We’re also **switching to subscriptions** **for new users** to set ourselves up for success in the next phase of Darkroom’s life.

## What does this mean for existing users?

Starting today, anyone who paid for anything prior to this release will have access to all our premium features for free. To be crystal clear, even if you only bought a single filter set 4 years ago, you’ll now have access to all the filters and all the tools! We’re doing this to honor the commitment we made to you when you supported us before this switch.

## How much is this going to cost new users?

For new users, a $3.99 per month or $19.99 per year subscription will unlock access to every filter and tool in Darkroom, on iPad and iPhones, now and in the future. As we grow and our product offerings expand, all new features and services will be included in this single subscription. For those who prefer to pay once and not have to reaffirm their commitments, we offer a one-time $49.99 purchase option.

## Why is this better?

Since we launched Darkroom 5 years ago, we have been committed to building a photo editing and management tool that rivals any market leader in features, experience, and design. We have also committed to working on Darkroom for the very long term. That’s why we never took any outside funding from investors, and why we opted to go slow and steady, rather than fast and furious. This work will only grow in scope and volume as the team grows and the platform we’re building grows with it.

As an example, for the past 12 months we have been busy rebuilding the core infrastructure of Darkroom from the ground up. This has been a massive investment in our future, and it will enable us to finally build out some long-awaited features, improve the stability of the app, and dramatically increase its power and efficiency. As we embark on this new phase of Darkroom’s life, we need to ensure that we have a healthy business that can support its continued development and the investments necessary to get there.

Subscriptions will hopefully increase our revenues and with that, we can hire more people, invest more heavily in our infrastructure, and expand the scope of our ambition. We have [5 years of history to demonstrate our commitment](https://darkroom.co/updates/), and we hope you in turn trust us with yours.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__B1N71Aj2g__q84VDdofylYw.jpeg"
  caption="In 3 years we shipped 51 updates, of which 19 where major releases."
  wide
/>

**Thank you to everyone who made a purchase over the past 5 years.** None of this would have been possible without your support. Photographers need to be able to rely on a professional tool that is constantly evolving, and we want to keep delivering just that.

---

<div id="watermark"></div>

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__KEMXyvtTzRud__xojPqpkMw.jpeg"
  caption="To change the placement of your text or logo, simply tap one of the 9 areas, or drag it to the right place."
  wide
/>

## Watermark your Photos (Premium)

Last year we added to ability to add copyright information to the EXIF metadata on export. For a more explicit form of protection, many people have written us asking for a watermarking feature. This makes total sense, particularly in a world dominated by social media where images are often stolen and re-shared without credit. Darkroom’s Watermark is a full-featured watermarking tool that allows you to set a text or image watermark, and control its size, location, opacity, and even typeface.

<div id="app-icons"></div>

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__c__whR66EOnaPmqyU5sjwdw.jpeg"
  wide
/>

## Customize your App Icon (Premium)

It doesn’t hurt to have a bit of fun now and then :) Those who have been following us for a while know that every year or so we tend to give our brand a big overhaul to reflect major changes to the app. Now you can pick from old favorites or fun new interpretations of our icon. We’ve included 10 options in a couple flavors:

*   We added the app icons for all of our previous release so please enjoy that Neon icon you all loved so much!
*   Yes, we even added our internal development build icon, which we once accidentally released publicly 🙈
*   Lastly we added 4 fresh variations for you all to play with, we are big fans of the Vintage one.

## **Export Summary (Free)**

Now you can see a short summary of your most important options when exporting a photo, such as export file type and quality, is watermark or copyright metadata protection added etc. Granted, this addition is subtle, but combines seamlessly with our Watermark addition, and gives us some headroom for future export additions.  
   
2020 will be a big year for Darkroom, and we’re thankful for your continued loyalty and support, and look forward to sharing everything we have in store for you.  
   
_The Darkroom Team_

Today’s release of Darkroom includes two new features that people have been asking for a long time: Export Watermark, and an expanded App…

Watermarking, App Icon Picker, and an update to our business

You can’t make the best iOS photo editor without integrating deeply into the system. Darkroom holds the mantle of the most deeply integrated photo editor, and with today’s release, we are pushing the latest iOS features to their limits.

## Light Mode!

Darkroom’s new **Light Mode** brightens up and freshens your photo editing experience. We carefully reviewed every button and slider to make everything feel natural. You’ll notice that the sliders have a fresher, more dynamic look to match the new mode. We also added **a lighter option for the App Icon!** Head to settings for the little surprise.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__Yjwz__VaOZFXdyBHri7OaRg.jpeg)


Beyond the aesthetics however, Light Mode provides an important function. The **environment that you view your photos in influences your perception** of those photos. In the context of Darkroom, we don’t know where you will edit or consume your photos, so a dark gray is a safe neutral background. However, often the consumption spaces today are bright (Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, etc). If you mostly share to social apps, **it makes sense for your editing environment to reflect and match your consumption environment**. Here’s an example demonstrating this fact:

![](/assets/images/posts/1__pW0hVJiQ5pt5e3v3pq2irg__2x.jpeg)


---

## A Supercharged iPad Experience

With the release of iPadOS, the iPad is no longer bound by the constraints of the iPhone. We wanted to ensure that the same applied to Darkroom. That’s why we invested heavily in the latest features of iPadOS to bring you an unparalleled, **pro-level editing experience by supporting Spaces**.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__Slc__k____OgVANCAHt2eFDEA.jpeg)

The new Split View and Slide Over modes unlock a whole new set of editing possibilities. Letting you work exactly how you want in even more intuitive ways. Here are a few ways you can use it to do more, in less time:

1.  **Open a new Space.** Simply tap-and-hold to pick up a photo in the Library and drag it to the left or right edge of the screen to open an editing space. If you decide to edit a different photo, pick it up and drop it over to the existing editing space, and it’ll replace it. As shown above, this way you can use one space to jump around your library efficiently, and even batch paste/delete/favorite/etc., while simultaneously editing as well.
2.  **Open the same photo in two spaces side by side.** This will help you try two sets of edits at once, and compare two edits side by side. Only one space will be active at a time, and when you activate other spaces (by interacting with them), you’ll be asked if you want to keep the current edits, or revert to the latest ones.
3.  **Two Darkroom libraries side by side.** Effortlessly perform batch editing operations on two albums simultaneously. You are effectively running two separate instances of the Darkroom app side-by-side.

## Siri Shortcut Action

iOS 13 expands the range of Siri’s third-party capabilities. This opened the door for us to build the Shortcut we’ve been dreaming about for a long time. With the new **Darkroom Siri Shortcut Action** you will be able to import images from anywhere, filter and frame them, and prepare them for export in Darkroom. There’s simply no parallel for this level of efficiency and automation.

This enables you to create your own Shortcuts, for which Apple has some great [documentation available](https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios). But to make this is as simple as we could we conveniently created an **example shortcut** for you, simply tap the link to download: [Selects the photos you favorited today, applies the A200 filter, and prepares Darkroom for exporting.](https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/d6830c7e727642dd8e2aa27e764f69a1)

![](/assets/images/posts/1__70kRWTWkC2IZu4iAvpOaSg.jpeg)


## Sound Effects

[Josh Mobley](http://www.joshmobley.com) is an incredible sound designer, responsible for the sound design in some of our favorite apps like [Heads Up!](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/heads-up/id623592465), [WeChat](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wechat/id414478124), and [Fantastical](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fantastical-2-for-iphone/id718043190). We were lucky enough to work with Josh to **create a gorgeous new soundscape for Darkroom**.

Sound helps us create a more immersive, meaningful, and emotional editing experience. Today we’re taking our first step by adding sounds for key events in your editing experience, and we look forward to expanding our soundscape with subtle, beautiful sounds that make your editing experience feel tactile.

---

## App-Wide Enhancements

We have also made improvements throughout the app. For a full list of changes, please refer to our [updates page](https://darkroom.co/updates/).  
   
 Until next time,  
_The Darkroom Team_

You can’t make the best iOS photo editor without integrating deeply into the system. Darkroom holds the mantle of the most deeply…

A Whole New Look for Darkroom: Light Mode, Multiple Spaces, Shortcut Action, and Sound Effects


The Darkroom Histogram is finally here in all its colorful, curvy glory! We obsessed over these little curves to create a histogram that was easy to use, and that goes beyond just a graph of numbers.

Our primary innovation here are the rich, verbose clipping indicators. Instead of abstract shapes that have no meaning, we show you contextual words that guide you through the histogram-driven editing process. We spent a lot of time making sure you see the right thing, at the right time, and in the right context.

To access the photo histogram either tap the (…) action menu when viewing a photo and selecting **Show Histogram,** or head to Settings in the app. To hide it quickly, you can just swipe it offscreen to the right.

---

## Ok great, but like, why?

Histograms help you more easily **spot and fix problems** with your photos **objectively**, **in a way that eye-sight alone isn’t suited for**. More specifically, histograms help you fix exposure and color problems in your image. Let’s talk about what a histogram shows you, so we can figure out how it helps you do those things.

A histogram is a diagram of how the pixels in your image are distributed. It goes from zero to one, left to right. During an editing session, we analyze the image and calculate how much of the image is 0% white, 1% white, 2% white, all the way to pure white. We do this for the three color channels as well: Red, Green, and Blue. We then plot those points to generate the final graph you see above your photo.

The three photos below shows different histogram shapes for different exposures. A **dark photo** will have a histogram that’s heavy on the **left side**. A **bright photo** will be heavy on the **right side**. And **most of your photos** will have a center weighted histogram like the one in the **middle** below.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2019-histogram-devices.jpeg"
  wide
/>

## Perfect Exposure, Every Time

Your iPhone will generally try to expose photos such that they use the full tonal range. However, there are many situations in which the camera will struggle. For example, if the sun is casting a glare on your photo, or you capture an image through a window, your photo may appear flat. You could eye-ball the fix, but due to screen brightness, features like True Tone, and ambient light, it can be very hard to know conclusively when you’re hit pure black/pure white. This is where a histogram shines. If your photo does not have any pixels in the pure-white bucket, the graph will be zero.

Here’s an example. Notice how the **white portion** of the histogram on the left doesn’t extend all the way to the edges. By adjusting the white and black sliders, we can stretch the histogram so that it takes advantage of the full tonal range, and you get a much richer image as a result. Many professional photographers do this as their first step in the editing process.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2019-histogram-women.jpeg"
  wide
/>

## Color

The Histogram also contains **color information.**This helps you spot color casts and white balance problems in your photo. Just like with exposure, your iPhone will try its best to capture the photo with the correct white balance settings, but it can’t always do that reliably.

Fixing color casts requires a bit more finesse. Here’s the thing to remember: When the red, green, and blue channels overlap in a region, that region no longer contains any color (When the three channels are equal, you get gray). However, **if you want a certain region to be gray, and it is not, then the histogram can tell you what to do.**

In the example below, the whole image has a green/blue tint to it because of the tinted windows it was shot through, and the time of day. This is confirmed by the histogram: Notice how much more blue and green there is in the highlights. By adjusting the tint, we can align the blue and green channels, and by adjusting the temperature and or curves, we can align the green and blue channel with them.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2019-histogram-london.jpeg"
  wide
/>

## Clipping

Clipping refers to data that is pushed out of range. Color information generally lives along a spectrum from 0 to 1. However, photo editing allows you to manipulate your data. If you make an image too bright, or too dark, you might push white or black too far, and all that data can be lost, or clipped.

We generally do our best to guard you from clipping information from your photo. But with tools like the Blacks and Whites, Curves, or Vignette, it’s not that hard to clip. **Without a histogram it’s rather difficult to see pure black and pure white** and know with certainty that you have lost details while editing. A histogram makes it easier to spot. When you see a **peak on either the left (black) or right (white) sides** you are running a risk of clipping.

When you have the histogram visible, we will **explicitly indicate in the histogram when you are clipping** blacks, whites, or color. We do so with indicators at either side of the histogram, and briefly with a short text message below. We also show you those **clipped pixels highlighted** by clearly **marking them on top of your photo** with pure white pixels in red, and pure black pixels in blue.

> **Note:** clipping warnings do not show unless you have the histogram shown. We have made it possible to turn off clipping warnings in settings.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2019-histogram-clipping.jpeg"
  wide
/>

---

## Blacks & Whites Tools — Free

We are sure you have had shots that looked **a tad flat and washed out**, with a lack of true white or black. Most images look best when they utilize the full range dark to light which can be displayed on your screen or in a print. This is the tool that makes it possible for you to stretch your darks towards true black, and your lights towards true white. When considering adjusting your blacks and whites, ask yourself: is there any region in the image which should be completely black or white, and does the image histogram show this?

> **Tip:** by stretching the range of your photo a lot you are increasing the likelihood of [posterization](https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/posterization.htm) happening. The posterization effect ranges from subtle to quite pronounced which looks like color bands or steps where you’d expect a smooth gradient. In your histogram you’ll spot posterization pretty easily as well in the shape of jagged edges instead of smooth curves. In your photo you will notice it the most in blue skies, and can counter act it a bit by adding Grain.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2019-histogram-ipad.jpeg"
  wide
/>

## Curves

Any time we think we can improve on the usability of the curves tool we grab it with both hands. In this iteration we now show you the curves of all edited channels in each channel. This means less switching to see or match what edits you had made in any of your other channels. Which makes for a subtle but powerful workflow improvement.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2019-histogram-curves.jpeg"
  wide
/>

## App-Wide Refinements

We’ve also taken a hard look across the app and added improvements throughout. For a full list of changes, please refer to our [updates page](/updates/).

---

As a final note, a huge Thank You to our most recent addition to the team Igor, for building much of this release and keeping on iterating. It would not have happened without you!

_The Darkroom Team_

The Darkroom Histogram is finally here in all its colorful, curvy glory! We obsessed over these little curves to create a histogram that…

Introducing the Darkroom Histogram


Darkroom 4.1 dramatically increases the number of ways you can get your photos into Darkroom for editing. It’s also packed with crowd-pleasing details that will improve the experience and efficiency of using Darkroom.

### Zero to Darkroom with one tap

What makes Darkroom unique is our deep integration with your photo library. We don’t have a cumbersome import step, and we allow you to freely navigate your library as you edit your photos. Yet this is only valuable though if you use Darkroom as your starting point for browsing and managing photos.

Over time it became clear that in order to fully deliver on our promise of making photo editing as fast and easy as photo browsing, we need to make it easy to start a Darkroom editing session anywhere. With today’s update, **there are now six (!) ways of starting a photo editing session** in Darkroom. Let’s start with the big one…

### Photo Editing Extension in the Photos App

You can now edit your photos with Darkroom right within the Photos app, or right after capturing a photo, using our [Photos Edit Extension](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205245#ios). Access the extension from the (…) menu when editing a photo in the Photos app, and you’ll have easy in-place access to the Darkroom editing experience.

As you’d expect, Live Photos are supported, and all the edits you make in the extension will be available for you in Darkroom itself.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__xKBwEtFOID8gP7haEU4G2A.jpeg)

> **Important!** In order for you to see and access the Photos Edit Extension, or several of the other new features below. You will have to enable them by: **1\.** Opening the Edit or Share Menu, and scrolling all the way to the right. **2.** Tap the “More” button. **3.** In the list that comes up to turn on Darkroom. **4.** Finally, re-order the list to make Darkroom accessible as one of the first in the list.

### Drag & Drop Photos to Darkroom on iPad

Drag & Drop on iPad is one of those feature you just have to try for yourself to see how cool and useful it is. Now photos can be directly [dragged and dropped](https://developer.apple.com/ios/drag-and-drop/) onto the Darkroom library to be imported to your photo library and an editing session will be started. Try it with multiple photos! After you start dragging one photo, use other finger(s) to tap on other images.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__s8EYnoqDay2YkkgUW__QLtg.jpeg)

**_Pro Tip:_** _You can combine iPad Drag & Drop with other apps that also support split-screen multitasking. Try_ [_Cascable_](https://cascable.se) _to import images directly from your DSLR to Darkroom. Whoosh!_

### From Photos to Darkroom

If you’re in the Photos app and want the full power of Darkroom to edit a photo you’re looking at, we added a new [Share Extension](https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ios/extensions/sharing-and-actions/) which allows you to tap **Edit in Darkroom** to hand over your photos from the Photos directly to Darkroom for convenient editing, without creating duplicates!

### Copy to Darkroom

If you are deep in an app like Dropbox or the Files apps looking for a photo, you can now easily import that photo to your library and edit it in Darkroom using the new **Copy to Darkroom** button right from the share sheet.

### Browse Your Files In Darkroom

The Album Picker gains the ability to launch the native Files app within Darkroom. You can find the new **Open** button right next to the new **Imported** smart album which we’ll discuss in more detail below. What’s particularly handy is that the [Files app](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206481) integrates with many [third-party storage services](https://www.macobserver.com/tips/quick-tip/files-app/) which gives you an incredible convenient way to import assets from places like Dropbox right within the app!

![](/assets/images/posts/1__vnQUNcVLidbg5NIwJLKp__w.jpeg)

### **Imported Smart Album**

With all these photos coming into Darkroom from many different places, we thought it would be useful to provide one convenient place to track all the photos you imported and/or copied into Darkroom. The new **Imported** smart album in the album picker will include these photos in the order that you imported them.

## App-Wide Refinements

Our commitment to refinement never stops. As such we’ve also taken a hard look across the app and added many improvements throughout. For a full list of changes, please refer to our [updates page](http://darkroom.co/updates/). Some highlights:

**Sort your photos by Date Added**  
This addition has to be one of the most frequently requested changes (Apart from Photos Edit Extension). Now the **All Photos** smart album is sorted by Date Added by default, just like in the Photos app. We have also added a button that allows you to switch to Date Modified and Date Created.

We have also decided to remove the “Hide Screenshots” setting. All your Screenshots are now neatly tucked into the **Screenshots** smart album in the album picker.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__wU2zzo0DvnNGv__wT07kaNg.jpeg)

**Batch Improvements**  
With the release of iPad support we saw a significant uptick in the use of, and feedback on our Batch tool. As a result we have made several improvements to make the tool more intuitive. The gestures are now simpler, just swipe left or right to start selecting a range of photos and we’ll even scroll along if you drag the selection up and down. The buttons now have labels for clarity, and we gave the Done button more visual prominence.

As a side-benefit to all this, we’ve added the ability to tap-and-hold to get the action menu of a photo while in batch mode, which allows you to copy edits and paste them in-place.

**Improved Privacy**  
Darkroom has long added a setting to disable the location information when exporting photos. In this update we have decided to enable the feature by default in order to protect your privacy further. This can be changed from Settings. We got your back.

**Increased Responsiveness**  
We spent a lot of time improving the layout code and the animations & responsiveness of the app so that as you rotate/resize the app, it should be much more stable and less likely to break.

As a final note, a big big **Thank You** to [Ashley](http://twitter.com/ashleynh) for building the Photos Edit Extension and helping us make this release amazing. Couldn’t have done it without you!

Until next time,  
_The Darkroom Team_

Darkroom 4.1 dramatically increases the number of ways you can get your photos into Darkroom for editing. It’s also packed with…

Darkroom Everywhere: Photos Extension, Drag & Drop, Files app, and more

It’s finally here! Darkroom for iPad is now available as a fully responsive universal app. You can download it [here](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/darkroom-photo-editor/id953286746).

### No Half Measures: Building the Best Photo Editing App for iPad

To build the best photo editor that feels native on the iPad, we need to deliver on three core promises:

*   **Respect the platform:** An iPad app should not be an upscaled iPhone app nor a downscaled desktop app. The best iPad app is touch-optimized, has easy-to-reach controls, and provides efficient access to its most important actions. Similarly, it must fit harmoniously in the iPad ecosystem. Darkroom shines by supporting Portrait Photos, RAW photos, Siri Shortcuts, and **_adding support for split screen multitasking and keyboard shortcuts._**
*   **Streamline the editing experience:** Importing photos takes time and effort and creates a duplicate library on your iPad. Worse, you may have to pay twice for storage! The best app should eliminate the import process and deeply integrate with [iCloud](https://www.apple.com/icloud/) Photo Library. Our Library Sync feature means that from launch, all your photos are instantly available. iCloud support is deeply integrated at all levels of the app, and you can favorite, hide, delete, and export without creating a shadow library.
*   **Be familiar**: What good is a powerful feature if nobody can use it or find it? Pro-grade tools have often lagged behind consumer tools in design and usability, but we believe that’s a false tradeoff. We pride ourselves on the usability and focus of our pro-grade tools. The best app should be familiar, recognizable and friendly. **_We have made pro-grade photo editing as fast and easy as browsing photos._**

Everything that’s new in this release is a reflection of these priorities and promises. Let’s jump right into all the new stuff!

---

### A Responsive, Universal Interface

We wanted to build a hyper-modern iOS interface that scaled to **_every iOS device size, in every split screen, and in both orientations_**. To accomplish that, we rebuilt the entire user interface from scratch using [Auto Layout](https://developer.apple.com/design/adaptivity/), Apple’s declarative layout engine, allowing us to fine-tune the layout for every device.

We’re excited to support three distinct layouts today: **_Portrait, Portrait-Wide, and Landscape_**. Darkroom will choose the best layout for each device and size, and you’ll always have a consistent editing experience. This new system allows us to improve how we handle gestures, delivering a more fluid navigation experience.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-ipad-universal.jpeg"
  wide
/>

### Extensive Keyboard Support

Efficiency is in our DNA, and what’s more efficient than keyboard shortcuts? We added extensive support for keyboard shortcuts to help you fly through the app.

Tap the arrow keys to move from next to the previous photo. Use the 1–7 keys to switch between the tools. Use the Command — F key to favorite. Use Command — Z to undo your last edit. Or even use Command — C to copy edits, and Command — V to paste them. **_To discover all the available keyboard short cuts simply hold down the Command ⌘ key in any view, or app, and get a neat overview of everything that’s available._**

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-ipad-keyboard.jpeg"
  wide
/>

### Giving Albums Their Due

Photo editing tools have a responsibility not only to make your photos look great, but also to help you manage your library. We capture photos all day, every day. What we need is a tool to make sense of the stream of photos we’re capturing. That idea informs the design of our library grid on iPad. We believe Albums are a core component of library management, and we’re taking the first step in bringing the same level of efficiency and power to Albums as we have to Photos.

On all landscape interfaces, we’ve **_promoted Albums to the top level of the library_**, putting them next to the photos, and added a collection of **_Smart Albums to the top to help you navigate by file type_**. Navigating between albums can now happen instantly, rather through complex multi-screen flows.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-ipad-grid.jpeg"
  wide
/>

### The Photo Strip

Having to constantly switch between the library and the editing interface as you navigate your library is a drag. The addition of the photo strip means that in landscape layouts, you can zoom through your library while editing, or quickly compare multiple photos to find the one with the perfect expression or the perfect light.

Most importantly, you have **_full access to the Photo Actions menu_** by long-pressing on a photo in the Photo Strip, meaning you can do complex library management and copy/pasting right from within a single editing session. Zoom zoom zoom!

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-ipad-actions.jpeg"
  wide
/>

### Color Histogram

The addition of the Color Histogram is the first big enhancement to the Color tool since it launched. With the new Color Histogram, you’ll be able to see at a glance the distribution of colors in your photo, and quickly visualize how the sliders (particularly hue) affect the image. We are constantly revisiting and refining every part of the app, and our tools are no exception. Look forward to more advancements here in the future.

![](/assets/images/posts/2018-ipad-histogram.jpeg)

### A New, Friendlier Brand

Every major version of Darkroom has come with a new brand, and version 4 is no different. We’ve loved all our brand iterations, but as Darkroom matures and grows, we wanted to soften the brand and make it more approachable. The new soft gradient and edges of the icon reflect a friendlier design update throughout the app, dropping all capitalized labels, making them more legible, and replacing our Hot Pink highlight color for a bold, Crimson Red.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-ipad-brand.jpeg"
  caption="As apparent, we are fans of a living brand. The above is just a small sampling of all the frequent explorations we do."
/>

### Darkroom × Moment

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with the folks at [Moment](https://www.shopmoment.com/) to add integration with their [Pro Camera app](https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple-store/id927098908?mt=8). Moment makes the [best lenses](https://www.shopmoment.com/shop/categories/lenses) for iOS, and we love what they contribute to the ecosystem. Now, if you have the Moment Pro Camera app installed, you’ll automatically get a button to open it from Darkroom, and vice versa. And if you have both the [Halide](https://halide.cam) and Moment camera apps installed, you’ll be able to choose which default camera app to use the first time.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-ipad-moment.jpeg"
  caption="If you have both Halide and Moment installed, you will be able to pick what app to use by default the first time you tap. Later, you can also tap-and-hold to re-choose what your default 3-party camera app of choice is."
/>



The mobile photography workflow starts with capture, and ends with export. Halide has set the bar high with the polish and refinement of their app, and their adoption of the latest technologies. Similarly, Moment creates the best lenses and cases, and supporting the wider ecosystem is paramount to building to best mobile photography experience.

### App-Wide Refinement

Every tool and every view has been refined to improve performance and usability. For a full list with details head to our [release notes](http://darkroom.co/updates). Some highlights:

*   **Value labels on sliders:** Being able to see the values means being able to reproduce and share looks. It means editing with more confidence and refinement.
*   **Filter strength:** We’ve revamped how it works, now, when you adjust the strength of a filter, you’ll be able to clearly see that adjustment in the filter at all times, and you can copy/paste edits with the strength adjustment, and even make your own filter with a custom strength.
*   **Full Right-To-Left language support:** When using the app in Arabic or Hebrew, the entire user interface will now flip, along with all the gestures and arrows. We’re extremely proud to offer first-class support for this.
*   **Undo and Redo Gestures:** Tap with two fingers to undo, three fingers to redo. Works on iPhone and iPad.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-ipad-iphone.jpeg"
  wide
/>

---

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you and your loved ones. We can’t wait to hear what you think!

Until next time,  
_The Darkroom Team_

It’s finally here! Darkroom for iPad is now available as a fully responsive universal app.

Darkroom For iPad: Faster. Easier. More Powerful.


Hot on the heels of our [iOS 12 & Hashtags](/blog/2019-ios12) release last month we are thrilled to bring you one of our most requested features: Film Grain. Combined with a wide set of RAW and Portrait workflow improvements.

---

## Film Grain — Free

There are many technical reasons why you may want to introduce film grain to your photo, and we’ll get to them, but artistically, it’s about richness and nostalgia. It introduces an emotionality and a mood to your photo that the crisp, clean, de-noised digital images of today cannot capture. Grain adds texture into otherwise flat regions of your image, giving your eye something to look at, something to notice.

![](/assets/images/posts/2018-grain-beach.jpeg)

When we set out to create our Grain tool, we wanted to capture that essence while maintaining the simplicity of Darkroom. We could have exposed multiple sliders and knobs for all the variables, but we challenged ourselves to give you a single tool that encapsulates the expressive range of film grain.

With analog film, the [speed or ISO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_speed#Film_sensitivity_and_grain) of the the film you choose is what defines the characteristics of the grain. The faster the film, the larger the grain, and the easier it is to shoot in darker scenes. The slower the film, the smaller the grain, the more suited to shoot in bright scenes.

> The size of silver halide grains in the emulsion affects film sensitivity, which is related to granularity because larger grains give film greater sensitivity to light.

![](/assets/images/posts/2018-grain-3up.png)

We effectively modeled our Grain Tool slider after **film speed**. When you drag the grain slider from left to right the grain starts of subtle and small, and as you move it to the right it becomes bigger and eventually samples around the grain to simulate the softness of high-ISO film. The result is a Grain tool that feels **intuitive and simple**, but doesn’t hold back any **expressive creativity**.

![](/assets/images/posts/2018-grain-slider.jpeg)

### Grain for Live Photos

A powerful aspect of how we built our Grain Tool is that it also works with Live Photos. We went through the effort to **generate a unique new grain map for every frame** to make sure it truly looks like the analog movement of film grain. Grain on video provides a whole other feel, and truly amplifies the nostalgic effect even beyond that of a still photo.

Watch this inspiring youtube short by [Nerdwriter1](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJkMlOu7faDgqh4PfzbpLdg) that does an incredible job of explaining and illustrating the power of Film Grain.

<YoutubeEmbed id="4PcpGxihPac" />

### When to Use Grain?

We already talked about how grain can be used to set a nostalgic mood. But it can also be used to hide issues in your photos:

*   **Compression Artifacts**: JPG images can be great for capturing great-looking photos off-the-camera. However, JPG photos are also compressed, and when pushed during edits can introduce banding or artifacts in areas that used to be smooth. The Grain tool hides these artifacts by blending these edges.
*   **Aggressive Noise Reduction:** iOS JPGs can sometimes be overly aggressively processed to decrease noise reduction, creating distinct sharp areas of color where some gradation is desired. The Grain tool can step in to blend these areas into each other.
*   **Unsharpness:** Not every photo we capture is perfectly sharp. In cases where the Sharpness tool can’t fix it, you can hide the problem using grain. By overlaying the photo with the grain’s sharp texture, creating the illusion of sharpness.

---

## RAW + JPG — Free

We’re excited to be the first app on iOS to support **seamlessly switching between RAW and JPG** when available.

One of our core philosophies is that **good tools should help you manage and declutter your library**. We were thrilled when our good friends at [Halide](https://lux.camera/halide-1-10-the-smartest-raw/) became the first and only app to support capturing RAW+JPG in a combined single asset that does just that**.** So now in our library there is one asset with a new icon, indicating RAW+JPG contains two files to switch between. And when viewing/editing the photo there is a type switch button in the top left.

Modern JPGs pack an enormous amount of computational brains behind them. Whether with Smart HDR or exposure bracketing or any other number of recent enhancements. RAW photos on the other hand, are unedited single-frame capture. This makes switching from RAW to JPG very valuable, giving you the power to choose the best version for each situation.

![](/assets/images/posts/2018-grain-raw.jpeg)

---

## App-Wide Refinements

Our commitment to refinement and quality doesn’t stop with adding bleeding-edge new features. We’ve also taken a hard look across the app and added many little improvements throughout the app. For a full list of changes, please refer to our [updates page](/updates/). Some highlights:

*   Added a convenient “Export Options” shortcut button to the export sheet so you can easily update copyright/location/file format settings while exporting.
*   Added library badges to differentiate between RAW and RAW+JPEG assets, and updated the RAW badge.
*   Improved the handling of RAW files with corrupt metadata, which now will still render correctly after initializing the RAW engine.
*   Improved the handling of Portrait images that fail to load depth data, they will now appear as JPEG images that can still be edited.
*   Improved the several reliability issues around downloading from iCloud.
*   Fixed an issue that caused Halide portrait photos to appear without blur on iPhone XS-and-newer devices.
*   Fixed a bug where rotating a portrait photo caused an over-rotation of the depth map.
*   Fixed issues that caused touch events to be missed while scrolling through library.
*   Fixed an issue where a couple of areas of the app weren’t properly translated.

Making progress, one step at a time…
_The Darkroom Team_

Hot on the heels of our iOS 12 & Hashtags release last month we are thrilled to bring you one of our most requested features: Film Grain…

Grain & RAW+JPG Switching support.


_It started out with a bug, how did it end up like this?_

Between iOS 12, Halide 1.9, and Darkroom 3.7, RAW previews in Darkroom became blurry. We went in to investigate, and what we found was not just the fix for the issue at hand, but a larger problem with how we were managing RAW images. Unpacking that problem resulted in a few benefits that make this dot-release more than just a bug fix, but worth its own Medium article:

1.  RAW images are now tack-sharp when previewed
2.  RAW images now support zooming at full resolution (This is new and pretty friggin’ amazing if we say so ourselves.)
3.  Fixed a problem that caused RAW images, especially with deep shadows, to appear washed out in Darkroom. Now RAW images should match the preview in Halide.
4.  Fixed a problem that caused RAW files from DSLR cameras to have missing metadata.
5.  RAW editing was never supported on devices older than the iPhone 6S but we didn’t properly degrade that feature so that it falls back onto the JPEG companion. Now if you have RAW images and you open them on, say, an iPhone 5S, you’ll still be able to edit the JPEG rather than get an error.

All these changes together make RAW editing even more pleasant and powerful and it’s quite magical to see this all running at 60fps on an iPhone when editing massive DSLR files. As always, there’s still lots to do, so don’t expect this to be the last RAW-focused update.

Please note, RAW files still are a massive memory strain on the phone. If you encounter crashes while zooming in and out, please let us know with a note at feedback@bergen.co. We’re monitoring this but it doesn’t seem to be too much of an issue to our beta testers.

That’s it for now.

Until next time,  
_The Darkroom Team_

It started out with a bug, how did it end up like this? We went in to investigate, unpacking the problem resulted in a few benefits that make this more than a dot-release.

A Big Little Update for RAW Photos


Following a long summer break in which our founder Majd Taby got hitched in the beautiful (and hot) fields of southern France, we are back with a feature-packed release.

## Hashtag Sets

Darkroom for iOS 12 adds the most extensive hashtag support for mobile photographers on iOS, allowing you to **export sets of hashtags to the clipboard with one tap.**

Darkroom was built on the the core principle of optimizing as much of our mobile photography workflow as possible. That optimization starts with photo management, extends to editing, and ends with sharing. We think that Hashtag Sets are an huge workflow improvement for those in the Instagram community, as it greatly optimizes the last step of the editing process: Sharing.

To really make hashtag sets useful and efficient, they need to be accessible everywhere. That’s why we went through the effort to make Hashtag Sets **accessible** **system wide.**

### **Siri Shortcuts**

When you’re right about to hit the post button and you realize that you forgot to copy your hashtags, the last thing you want to do is leave your context and go hunt down some note with the right set of hashtags to copy. It just takes too much effort. **With Darkroom Siri Shortcuts, you can now define a custom shortcut for several hashtag sets, and instantly access it from anywhere in the system** using your own custom phrase, without launching the app.

![](/assets/images/posts/2018-ios12-siri.jpeg)


### **Export Option**

If Darkroom is the last step in your editing process, you can now select several hashtag sets that will be copied right after your export is finished. If you decide you want to add to or change your hashtags, you can even do that without losing your context.

### **Today Widget**

For the times when you can’t speak or when you want to copy several hashtag sets, but don’t want to jump into the app, there’s the Today widget. You can select any of your hashtags and copy them in just two taps.

### **Quick Actions**

In fact, our Today Widget is also accessible from the app icon on your home screen using force touch, along with some handy shortcuts to jump right into an editing session in the app for your most recent photo, or to quickly manage your hashtags.

---

## Portrait HD – iOS 12

iOS 12 adds support for what Apple calls “Portrait Matte Effect”. In essence, this is a High-Definition depth-map that iOS generates when it detects a face in a Portrait-mode photo that provides much sharper hair-and body contours.

When we detect the presence of a high definition portrait matte associated with the photo, we’ll load it automatically, and indicate it with the “Portrait HD” badge. It’s remarkable how high quality these depth maps are, particularly with their rendering of hair.

We default to showing the high-definition variant, but in certain situation, you might care less about the sharp-contours, and care more about gradual scene gradation. There’s a trade-off between scene-detail and hair-detail, and **we give you the power to make your own choice**.

![](/assets/images/posts/2018-ios12-portrait.jpeg)


### Editable F-Stop and Portrait Lighting Effect

When Darkroom launched Depth Editing in version 3.5, it was not possible to edit the background-blur of a portrait photo. To add support for that feature, we had to load the _original, unedited_ version of the image, so that we can apply our own blur to it.

However, loading the unedited version of the image meant that any edits you had made to the photo in any other app would be lost. In iOS 12, with the addition of amazing looking editable f-stops in the Photos app, we decided that it no longer made sense to give up the support for Photos.app edits, so **we have deprecated the blur slider from Darkroom on iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR.** You will be able to continue to use our other Portrait foreground and background tools. And custom blur will continue to operate as-is on older devices.

Since the blur operation was computationally heavy, it made editing Portrait images much more memory and CPU expensive. With today’s update, Portrait images are as fast and sharp as normal JPEGs, using much less memory.

---

## App-Wide Refinements

Our commitment to refinement and quality doesn’t stop with adding bleeding-edge new features. We’ve also taken a hard look across the app and added many little improvements throughout the app.

For a full list of changes, please refer to our [updates page](/updates/). Some highlights:

![](/assets/images/posts/2018-ios12-progress.jpeg)


### Progress & Status

We finally got around to updating one of the oldest parts of our app, the status and progress messages. They used to be either indeterminate, or text only, and often left people wondering if anything was actually happening. The new experience was completely reconsidered to be a lot more visual and provide a very clear understanding of progress. We not only report actual **progress when saving photos** (which can take long when you are on an older iPhone dealing with a large photo) but we also make sure to clearly indicate **progress for when we actually have to download a photo from iCloud** before we can actually process and save the edited photo. This makes for an especially big upgrade when using our Batch tool for exporting photos.

As an extension of the progress indication we also added status messages to clearly indicate when an export is done, with a satisfying animate checkmark. But also to **acknowledge a successful action**; copied hashtag sets, copied or pasted edits and so forth.

### RAW Stability Improvements

We made a handful of improvements to how our RAW engine works with memory usage which significantly helped improve stability.

---

Making progress, one step at a time…
_The Darkroom Team_

Following a long summer break in which our founder Majd Taby got hitched in the beautiful (and hot) fields of southern France, we are back…

Hashtag Sets, Siri Shortcuts, Portrait HD & More in Darkroom for iOS 12

After months of hard work, we’re thrilled to introduce the **Frame Tool,** a new and free top-level tool, the **Duotone** premium filter pack, and an enormous list of app-wide improvements to keep Darkroom head and shoulders above the pack in **quality and performance**.

---

## A new dimension of expression with the Frame tool

Frames for mobile photography grew out of the need to share non-square photos on Instagram. Since then, white frames continued to be extremely popular. We challenged ourselves to dig into that behavior and create a tool that stands as a form of creative expression on its own. We’re thrilled to introduce the Frame tool today with two industry-leading features: **Content-Aware Frame Colors** & **Frame Inset Presets.**

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-frames-cloud.png"
  alt="Cloud"
  caption="We‘re very excited about the creative opportunities of the Frame tool with stories. Our good friend Luke Beard of Exposure has been quietly experimenting with Frames in the 9:16 ratio and we love it!"
  wide
/>

### **Content Aware Color Palette**

The color of the frame itself is hugely impactful to how the viewer’s eye perceives colors in your photos. That’s why we added **content-aware colors** which automatically analyze the photo and pick a curated set of colors that perfectly match your photo. **This ensures you always have frame colors to pick from with just a tap, that will fit the mood of your photo seamlessly.**

Whether to extend the natural edges of your photo, or to make the key colors in the photo pop, it’s remarkable how much more impactful your photos can be with the right border.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-frames-smart.png"
  caption="It looks so simple and intuitive for a human to pick dominant colors in a photo, in reality it’s quite tricky to get a computer to do this well and quickly. If you want to learn more about some of the underlying technology Matt Nedrich wrote a great article on the subject. You can also try a web demo he made to play around with several different algorithms to create a color palette."
  wide
/>

### Frame Inset Presets — Stories & Social-Media cards

Just as important as being able to control the color aspect of a frame, we also found it extremely important to control its size. Insetting on a square is great for Instagram specifically, but other platforms have different formats. So we added support for _9:16 ratio_ for **Snapchat and Instagram Stories**, _4:5_ for **Instagram portrait photos**, and _2:1_ for those times you need your **social post attachment** to look on point. Oh, we also made sure these frame inset presets are accessible when **exporting**, even through **batch**!

> **Pro-tip:** The inset slider remembers the last used value. This enables you to efficiently maintain a consistent border across your exports, particularly with batch exports!

---

We felt the word “border” was actually the wrong way to talk or or even think about this feature. In our research we leaned into the [historical use of frames](https://theframeblog.com/2016/06/09/how-artists-have-used-the-frame-in-the-past-how-they-can-use-it-now/).

> "With frames we intend to help photographers extend or enhance a photo beyond its original bounds, and to gain control over the context in which it is viewed".

<YoutubeEmbed id="RaayB_Y-XL0" />



---

## Duotone Filters — Premium, only $1.99

To showcase one of the coolest aspects of the Frame tool, we’re thrilled to release our newest premium filter pack: Duotone Filters. Extremely graphical and punchy, these filters will make your photos feel like they popped right out of a magazine.

We’ll also note that this Duotone look was created entirely inside our Curves tool. We think it is a great showcase of how our tools can be used in varied and creative ways. So we’d encourage all of you to take a look at the curves of these filter to see how these looks where achieved.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-frames-filters.jpeg"
  alt="Photo Cloud"
  caption="Duotone is a look that originates from the print industry. As a way to economically represent photography using 2 or more colors. You can learn more about it on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duotone"
  wide
/>

---

## App-Wide Refinements

Our commitment to refinement and quality doesn’t stop with adding bleeding-edge new features. We’ve also taken a hard look across the app and added many little improvements throughout the app.

For a full list of changes, please refer to our [updates page](/updates/). Some highlights:

![](/assets/images/posts/2018-frames-location.jpeg)

### Privacy Enhancement

Inspired by recent debate around online privacy, and specifically [Halide](https://lux.camera/a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-cookies/)’s embrace of increased privacy in the context of mobile photography, Darkroom 3.6 adds a setting to enable and disable the embedding location information when exporting photos. That way location can be maintained privately on your phone for captured photos, but can be removed when sharing to third party platforms to prevent tracking.

### Scroll to Bottom

Sometimes the smallest details have a huge impact. This is one of those cases. When hunting around for certain photos in our library we often need to scroll back down to our latest shots. Now that’s super easy as well as we will pop in a “Scroll to Bottom” button when you are scrolled up a bit. The devil is in the details.

### Image loading and caching

We have completely revamped our image loading and caching layer to improve the performance of using Darkroom, and address a massive list of issues. As a key benefit, we now offer much deeper integration with other photo editing apps that use Modify Original.

This means you can open a photo in Darkroom, edit it, then go to another app like TouchRetouch, use it to remove an object, then come back to Darkroom and continue editing, even exporting over the same photo.

You shouldn’t notice these improvements, but Darkroom should feel faster, more stable, and more capable, which is our never-ending pursuit.

---

Goodness, there’s still so much to do…

_The Darkroom Team_

After months of hard work, we’re thrilled to introduce the Frame Tool, a new and free top-level tool, the Duotone premium filter pack, and…

Content-Aware Frames, Duotone Filters, and an enormous list of improvements


The purpose of a photo editing tool is to bring out the best of your photos by channeling your viewer’s attention. The Curves tool does this by splitting the photo into bright and dark regions, and the Color tool into color regions, allowing you to edit them separately. Today, Darkroom adds the ability to edit along a magical new dimension: Depth.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-depth-3up.jpeg"
  wide
/>

Professional photographers rely on expensive lighting equipment to direct the attention of the viewer. These tools have always been too big or too expensive for the casual/semi professional photographer, relegating its use to the photography elite. When combined with expensive lenses, they have the ability to not only use light to separate subjects, but also blur. **For the first time ever, these same capabilities are available in your pocket, at the click of a button.**

The unprecedented advances in mobile photography have for the first time unlocked these capabilities to the mobile photographer. Apple has done a remarkable job at making it accessible within the Camera app, as has [Halide](https://lux.camera/halide-1-7-in-depth/) in adding more control and fidelity to the experience. What has been missing is a powerful and flexible tool to take full advantage of the creative potential.

## Depth Aware Portrait & Instant Filters

In an industry first, Darkroom introduces Depth-Aware filters. As of today, all the filters in our premium Portrait & Instant filters are depth-aware, with more to come in the near future. When you apply a Portrait filter to a Portrait image, Darkroom will automatically apply necessary edits to take advantage of the depth data to make your photos pop even more.

Darkroom’s filters are all made exclusively using our tools in the app. Unlike the static non-editable filters of other photo editing apps, you can fit the filter to your photos, not the other way around. It also allows us to take full advantage of our own toolkit as it grows and matures: As our capabilities grow, so too will the power of our filters.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-depth-filters.jpeg"
  wide
/>

## **Powerful Depth Map Preview & Editing — Free**

We’ve also added powerful depth editing tools with a realtime depth map preview to give you complete creative ownership over your photo. You decide what part of the photo is blurry and how much — All with a slide of your finger. Additionally, to see the raw depth data simply tap and hold the Portrait label on the photo.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-depth-tools.jpeg"
  wide
/>

## Extended-Range RAW Editing — Free

The power of RAW files lies in their ability to capture fine detail in extreme shadows and highlights, thus extending the dynamic range of your camera. With the addition of extended-range RAW editing, we’re unlocking all that extra detail and putting it at your fingertips. Seeing is believing:

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-depth-raw.jpeg"
  wide
/>

We’ve also rebuilt the Brightness, Contrast, Highlights, and Shadows sliders to take full advantage of the extended range capabilities of our RAW engine. You won’t believe how much detail you’ll be able to magically recover from the black and whites of your photos.

## App-Wide Refinements

Our commitment to refinement and quality doesn’t stop with adding bleeding-edge new features. We’ve also taken a hard look across the app and added many little improvements throughout the app. Some highlights:

### Rebuilt Highlights & Shadows Sliders

We’ve rebuilt the Highlights & Shadows sliders from the ground up to improve their effects on your photos. They now also go in both directions, allowing you to push your highlights up and your shadows down.

### Exposure Preservation

If your photo is underexposed or overexposed, then every filter you apply will be similarly improperly exposed. If you take the time to correct the exposure of your photo, Darkroom filters will no longer undo your work every time you switch filters. This allows you to cycle through filters efficiently without having to constantly readjust exposure settings every time. A small detail, but an important one!

### Redesigned Badge System

With the addition of Portrait photo support, we took the opportunity to revamp our app-wide badging system to keep the focus on your photos and make identifying which photo you want to edit as easy as possible.

### App Performance

We’ve optimized various key components to improve app startup and navigation performance. Now, the app should launch faster, the grid badges should appear sooner, and the delay when dismissing a photo should be gone.

## Bonus: Halide Integration!

This love affair is a two way street, baby! We’re thrilled to release the second half of the Darkroom: [Halide](https://lux.camera/halide-1-7-in-depth/) integration with the new Halide button right at the top of your photo library. Now, capturing, editing, and recapturing can be done with unprecedented efficiency.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/2018-depth-badges.jpeg"
/>

We have so so much that we’re working on this year that we can’t wait to share with you! Your continued support is what allows us to share our dream of a utopian photo editing experience free of cumbersome subscription plans and growth hacks. Thank you for being loyal Darkroom photographers, this wouldn’t be possible without you.

Until next month,  
_The Darkroom Team_

Darkroom’s latest update continues to push the boundaries of joyful mobile photo editing by adding depth editing, and extended-range RAW.

Depth Editing, Extended-Range RAW Editing & App-Wide Refinements


Three years ago to the day, [Matt Brown](https://twitter.com/brownthings) and I launched the first version of Darkroom. Thank you to all the photographers who have been relying on Darkroom week-in-week-out to edit their photos on the go, and a special thank you to those who have stuck with us through the years. Without your continued support and encouragement, it is not at all clear that we would be here to write this post.

[Jasper](http://twitter.com/jasperhauser) and [I](http://twitter.com/jtaby) recently finished our 6-month plan for the first half of the year, and we can’t be more thrilled about the things we have in store for you. Soon!

**Darkroom Stat-flash**

2017 was a very exciting year for us. The marquee launch of Darkroom 3 got a lot of attention and praise. What went unnoticed however, was a massive effort to understand the key metrics of our business, tuning them, and trying to make Darkroom a profitable business so we can survive and thrive. That work has manifested itself in our bottom line in a big way. If you would allow me this moment of vanity:

*   **In 2017, we were finally able to pay ourselves reasonable salaries, and STILL make a profit**! That means we can dedicate 100% of our time on Darkroom, rather than having to split it contracting or stressing out about money.
*   **We increased our weekly-active-photographer metric by 80% and our download rate by 50%** compared to 2016, all of which translated to…..wait for it:
*   **More than one million photos shared every single month!** — And a Darkroom session is started somewhere around the world every single second. Since launch, **nearly 32 million photos have been exported from Darkroom**.
*   **We increased our average App Store rating to a whopping 4.8 stars**, with thousands of reviews, and more coming every day.

I mean, look at this graph of our Weekly-Active-Photographers:

![](/assets/images/posts/1__5vhW9qs3j23RWV__irWNpxg.png)

Zooming out and looking at our data since launch, what’s remarkable is that soon we will average the same number of users _every week_ that we had during our initial launch, during which we were the most prominently featured app on the App Store for a whole week! Even more incredible? Almost half of the peope who try Darkroom every month use it every week.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__jn__nmTVPhKdyOw8LAP9Xtw.png)

If you’re in the business of making apps, you’ll know that among the most successful apps on the store, our numbers aren’t ground-breaking. We have a massive head-way ahead of us to grow. Truth be told, had we raised venture capital (which we almost did, multiple times), we could have built out our feature roadmap much much earlier than we did. However, it would have left us with a ticking time bomb on our back to liquidate or hit escape velocity.

We believe very strongly that we can and are in an amazing position to establish ourselves as the premiere photo editing app on iOS, and for our loyal user-base, we already are. But in order to do that, we need to be free from external forces that put pressure on us to prioritize what’s good for their bottom line, rather than what’s good for the collective bottom line of our users.

Starting a company is hard, there’s no going around that fact. Yet we times get tough, we remind each other: If we don’t push through and succeed, we’ll have to revert to using something else to edit our photos, and that’s not a world we want to live in, and it’s not an option we’re willing to force on our users.

Because we are bootstrapped and independent, **we have one focus and one focus only: Maintain Darkroom’s seemingly-paradoxical position as the most powerful, yet easiest, fastest, and pleasurable photo editing app on iOS.**

And boy oh boy are we excited about the next few months…
_The Darkroom Team_

Three years ago to the day, Matt Brown and I launched the first version of Darkroom. Thank you to all the photographers who have been…

Thank you, 32 million times over: Celebrating Darkroom’s Third Birthday


We have a lot to talk about, but let’s start with the news: Darkroom 3.3 is a little Christmas present for our users. Addressing the most common issues people are reporting with our app today, we wanted to leave you for the holidays on a high note:

1.  **Added support for RAW+JPEG images.** Now, when Darkroom detects that the photo is a RAW+JPG composite image, it will default to treating it as a RAW image. This should come as great news to DSLR users who prefer shooting in that mode, and the many users of our new “sister-app”, [Halide](http://halide.cam), which recently added support for the feature. Currently, the JPEG variant is inaccessible. We plan on adding deeper support to this file type in the future.
2.  **Improved Modify Original export option.** Darkroom now integrates more naturally with the iOS ecosystem, allowing you to continue editing on top of preivous edits, made either by the Photos app or other third-party apps. This should make the experience much more seamless for those who rely on multiple apps in their editing flow.

*   **Auto Align Setting.** As part of our Darkroom for iPhone X release, we added support for Auto Align using Apple’s brand-new machine-learning-backed Vision framework. Unfortunately, we didn’t add a way to disable that feature. This update addresses that shortsightedness on our part.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__HAeJC__So9CORJu6Wu6Hp7Q.png)

### Christmas Giveaway

We’re also holding a 1-week holiday giveaway. Share your Darkroom-edited holiday photos with the #darkroomapp hashtag on Instagram, and we’ll give away **50** promo codes to unlock absolutely everything in the app. We’ll pick the best photos and we’ll DM you on Instagram to share the codes. Tell your friends! Ho ho ho!

It’s been quite a year for Darkroom. Days before Christmas, looking back at the past 12 months, we can’t help but take a moment to take stock of how far we’ve come.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__BqJ6hZgK9Ohdw9QzqANXKg.png)

Darkroom’s **capabilities have dramatically expanded** this year. We have always been a powerful iPhone photo editing application. Yet this year we matured into a **full-fledged photo-editing and management** studio. We added support for RAW, Live Photos, Batch editing, Perspective, Metal 2, iPhone X, and [so, so much more](http://darkroom.co/updates). Darkroom is no longer a place to only edit the curve of your photo. With batch-editing support and performance rivaling that of the Photos app itself, Darkroom is where you manage your photos too! That duality of management and editing in fact, has been our dream from inception. It just took a long time to get there. We still have miles ahead to go.

The amount of growth and the rapid acceleration in our release schedule are direct results of our massive investment in infrastructure. In 2017, we harvested the fruits of that labor, and the response has been incredible. We thank you for the amazing photos you share on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/usedarkroom/), and the kind words you share on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom), iTunes reviews, or feedback emails. It’s very rewarding to know that the work and effort we put into the tiniest details doesn’t go unnoticed.

Today, we sow the seeds for next year’s harvest. We have spent the past month working on exciting new features that we can’t wait to put in your hands, and our product roadmap looks more and more exciting as iOS’s photography capabilities continue to grow (new APIs, more power, and new image-type support). We have a lot more to say about that soon, but we will keep this update short and sweet.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you and your loved ones. We look forward to sharing more news with you soon. Stay tuned!

_The Darkroom Team_

We have a lot to talk about, but let’s start with the news: Darkroom 3.3 is a little Christmas present for our users. Addressing the most…

RAW + JPEG, Modify Original, and a Christmas Giveaway


Hot on the heels of last month’s blockbuster Darkroom 3 release with over 18 user-facing new features, we’re thrilled to share Darkroom for iPhone X — An update designed to take every advantage of the device’s unique screen. We couldn’t help ourselves from adding a few other highly-requested features too 😉 If you’re impatient, scroll down for the full changelog.

---

### Designing for the iPhone X

Like most developers, when we first saw the iPhone X screen during Apple’s keynote, our first reaction was “Woah! Cool!” followed quickly by “But wait…how does that work with my rectangular app?” followed shortly thereafter by “The home button is on-screen and uses the bottom-edge-swipe? How does _that_ work with my app?”

We didn’t have answers right away. Twitter was fast to condemn the notch/forehead as proof-positive of Apple’s shortcomings in design, but we saw it as a worthwhile tradeoff between form and function, and wondered how we can **embrace the notch** with a warm hug and a big kiss.

A quick session with a friend’s Essential phone (with an OLED displaying and a mini-notch) confirmed that the new screen’s perfect blacks were, indeed, quite perfectly black, and that surrounding the notch with app content did indeed lend itself to a very immersive experience when embraced.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__3q86toepTk0ftPqTlYPxNA.jpeg"
  caption="The iPhone X essentially provides the physical form factor of the 6/7/8, or ~5.5 x 2.75 Inch, but fits in more pixels and a larger physical screen."
  wide
/>

Speaking specifically from Darkroom’s perspective, the other aspect of the screen that immediately stood out to us was the aspect ratio. You see, during Darkroom’s inception, the iPhone 5S was king of iOS, Instagram was the primary use-case we designed for, and Instagram was square-only. As such, we designed the app to fit a full-width square image, with enough space left over for the tools below.

Since then, iPhones have gotten much bigger, and Instagram now supports non-square images. Portrait iPhone photos became much more popular. However, because of height-constraints, Darkroom had to downsize the photos to accommodate the tools. The iPhone X, in contrast, has a taller screen than the iPhone 8 Plus, but is approximately as narrow as the iPhone 8. This presented a unique opportunity for us, which we took full advantage of by redesigning the navigation bar, and adjusting the dimensions of the toolspace. Now, **on iPhone X, Darkroom can render a full-size portrait iPhone photo while editing.**

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__iKT2M51Hq9k5__U3ZF2n4NQ.jpeg"
  caption="iPhone 8 (left) vs iPhone X (right). The iPhone X isn’t physically much bigger than an iPhone 8, only 0.2 inch taller and 0.34 inch wider. It has a taller screen though, allowing us to show more photo and more controls."
  wide
/>

---

### Embracing the Screen: Wide-Gamut Color support, HEIF, and Metal 2

Apart from the support of the notch, we also wanted to take advantage of the new OLED display which has a much higher contrast ratio than the previous generations. That’s why **we made Darkroom end-to-end colorspace aware**, in order to edit, preview, and export full wide-gamut color images using the **Display P3 color space**, one of the only third-party editing apps on iOS to support it.

All of this is backed by our latest update to the rendering pipeline, and enabled by the deep investment in infrastructure we made in Darkroom 3. With today’s update, iPhone 7-and-newer devices render and process everything on top of the latest Metal 2 technologies, delivering **even faster editing performance, improving rendering quality, and adding support for the full range of colors supported by the screen**.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__fMWAOmluaCuGeCZJoa__TSg.jpeg"
  caption="The investment we made in overhauling the whole engine for 3.0 has proven fertile ground, enabling us to add amazing state of the art technologies at an incredible pace."
  wide
/>

---

### Extending Darkroom’s Capabilities

Along with the all the UI and infrastructure changes to support the iPhone X, we have also extended Darkroom’s editing and management capabilities. In this update, we have tackled one of the big requests from the community: **Full metadata support**.

Now, when you long-press on an image in the grid or tap on the “…” action menu while editing, you will be presented with an option to “View Metadata”, which will load the most relevant information attached to the photo. On the other side, you can now **attach copyright information** to photos you share from Darkroom.

We also added support for Apple’s new image codec, **HEIC**, by adding support for the new files format in the revamped “Export Options” Settings page. The file size savings are quite impressive, particularly at slightly-compressed quality settings.

Finally, we are releasing our first integration with Apple’s new Machine-Learning Vision framework with the addition of **auto-horizon-detection and correction**. Now, when you opt-in to the feature, Darkroom will analyze your photo, and if it detects that the photo is mis-aligned, it will automatically align it for you.

<Figure
  src="/assets/images/posts/1__EiIq8GxtAUqj__N3gbWU0Iw.jpeg"
  caption="1. HEIF and Copyright Metadata Export options, 2. Chromeless viewing of your Library, 3. Metadata viewing in app."
  wide
/>

We hope you enjoy these changes, and we look forward to seeing what you guys do with Darkroom. Please tag your photos with #darkroomapp so we can feature your great work with our community :)

---

### Full Changelog

*   **iPhone X UI** — An updated design for the iPhone X that embraces the new 2436x1125-pixel screen, making for a more immersive experience.
*   **Wide-Gamut Color Support** (Display P3 colorspace) — The Super Retina Display of the iPhone X brings stunning colors, true blacks, high brightness, and a 1,000,000 to 1 contrast ratio. We added end-to-end colorspace support to take full advantage of its color depth and contrast.
*   **Metal 2 Rendering** — In the process of enabling Wide Gamut Color we also gained a stunning performance increase. We are now powered by Metal 2 rendering, providing us near-direct access to the graphics processing unit (GPU), and enabling us to fully maximize graphics moving forward (Only on supported devices).
*   **Auto Horizon Detection and Correction** — The Transform tool now detects and provides auto correction to quickly and easily (opt-in). All using Apple brand new Vision Machine Learning tools.
*   **Metadata support** — Simply access it from the action menus (Long press on grid or tap the ‘…’ button in the edit screen. See all the most important EXIF metadata fields.
*   **Copyright Metadata for exporting** — Accessible through Export Options in Settings, you can now add copyright metadata (creator, copyright notice) to your photo when exporting.
*   **High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF)** — Support for importing and exporting. This new file format developed by Apple provides equal quality compared to JPEG, but at a much higher compression rate enabling smaller files sizes.
*   Improved how immersive the Library grid is by auto hiding the Album Picker, and **collapsing and hiding Header Action Bar when scrolling up** into the library.
*   Improved the Purchase Dialog shown after tapping buy from the purchase bar
*   Fixed a problem that caused the app the library grid to sometimes not updated the photo previews properly
*   Fixed two minor layout issues with the Live Photo and iCloud loader indicators

_The Darkroom Team_

Hot on the heels of last month’s blockbuster Darkroom 3 release with over 18 user-facing new features, we’re thrilled to share Darkroom for…

Darkroom for iPhone X

_RAW, Perspective, Batch, and so, so, so much more_

I’ll be honest, I don’t know what I’ve been more excited to share: The biggest feature release in Darkroom’s history, or the badass new neon branding. It’s a toss-up if you ask me, but it’s here! It’s bright and colorful, and it’s ready to grace your homescreens with 18 new user-facing features, so let’s groove!

Over 15 months in the making, 60% of the app has been completely rewritten for this update, including an all-new image processing engine. Beyond enabling the new features we’re releasing today, this big investment in our infrastructure allows us to lay a foundation for our future plans, because y’know, we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive!

It’s been three years since we launched Darkroom and the response from the community has been incredible. Today, millions of people have downloaded the app, and hundreds of thousands actively use it every month, many of them daily. We were included in the Best of the App Store and featured in Apple’s Retail stores worldwide. That’s the way I like it.

Ok. I’m out of Disco references. Let’s get on with it.

[**_Download Darkroom 3 From the App Store Now_**](https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple-store/id953286746?pt=117198944&ct=Medium%20Version%203%20Launch&mt=8)

---

### RAW and the new Darkroom Engine

We’re very proud to finally announce RAW editing support, as well as Large JPEG and Live Photo editing support. All these features are enabled by the brand new Darkroom Engine built on the latest Apple technology which allows us to provide much deeper integration with the system, and much faster performance.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__o6fsF9h9PtJeVCzdKUE8yA.jpeg)


**New features**

*   RAW photo editing support from a wide range of cameras and leveraging the full color depth available.
*   Live Photo editing and playback support (Available only with “Modify Original” export option).
*   Large JPEG photo and panorama support.
*   Uncompressed TIFF export support images, as well as 95% and 80% compressed JPEG to save file space.
*   Highlights, Shadows, Tint and Vibrance slider support for all photo types.

**Enhancements to existing features**

*   Full resolution zoom on non-RAW photos.
*   The “Modify Original” export option no longer loses edit history. Edit, export, then continue editing and re-export if you need to without ever losing your edit history.
*   Much more memory efficient loading and rendering leading to a much more pleasant and efficient editing experience.

---

### Perspective and the Transform tool

The biggest update to our tools comes to the Transform tool, previously called the Crop & Rotate tool.

Have you heard the term “App Safari”? [Jessica Zollman](http://instagram.com/jayzombie) mentioned it to me recently, and I thought it perfectly captured how mobile photographers often edit photos. Because most apps offer very focused feature-sets, a photographer often has to rely on multiple apps to edit photos.

Obviously, using fewer apps to edit all your photos is an aspiration; Each export/import causes more JPEG artifacts and compression, and each takes time and effort. That’s why we’re thrilled with the addition of perspective and re-addition of white border support. Each of those features work seamlessly in Darkroom without overloading the UI with complexity, and each prevents an app-hop, something we’re always trying to do. Sprint, don’t hop!

*   Added support for Vertical and Horizontal perspective correction.
*   Added support for white borders with 3 different styles.
*   Added ability zoom while cropping in order to improve crop accuracy.
*   Added ability to flip an image horizontally.
*   Refined the aspect ratios to make them more semantic.
*   Expanded list of supported crop grids.
*   Added support from crop and rotation changes in the History tool.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__8Umipubcl212ANyOtxi__mA.jpeg)


---

### Batch editing and Library Sync

Last, but _definitely_ not least, we’ve added comprehensive support for batch editing in Darkroom. We didn’t want to simply let you paste edits onto multiple images, we wanted to embed batch editing into the app through and through. There are two parts to doing this: Quick Actions, and Batch Processing. Both are deeply integrated into the native iOS Photo Library using Library Sync. Quick actions are accessible by long-pressing on a photo in the grid, or using the Actions button in the editing interface.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__F72DMLuz5VXoDPwdVnMgCA.jpeg)


Support Batch Actions:

*   Delete multiple photos at the same time.
*   Favorite & unfavorite photos.
*   Hide & retrieve photos.
*   Paste edits from the app’s clipboard.
*   Reset edits to multiple photos.
*   Export multiple photos, with optional white border.

Supported Quick Actions:

*   Revert photo after exporting with the “Modify Original” option.
*   Copy edits to the app’s clipboard.
*   Favorite/Hide/Delete photo.

---

We hope you enjoy these features. There’s a lot more in the app that we haven’t touched on, like Chromeless viewing and SnapScroll, but we’ll give those features the space they need in future blog posts.

To stay up to date with the latest happenings of Darkroom, make sure you follow us on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/usedarkroom) and [Instagram](http://instagram.com/usedarkroom).

Thank you for reading, we can’t wait to see what you do with Darkroom.

_The Darkroom Team_

RAW, Perspective, Batch, and so, so, so much more

Say Hello to Darkroom 3


It’s Monday in Amsterdam! We’re busy here working along the beautiful canals getting fresh bits ready for your consumption. Fresh out the oven:

*   **Haptic feedback** — We’ve sprinkled haptics throughout the experience where we felt it made sense. Our primary objective was to provide weight and tactility to the app, and we tried to be judicious but generous where it mattered. We think it adds a nice physical dimention to the experience of the app, and hope you like it. Here’s where you can look for it:
*   **Sliders:** When you hit the minimum and maximum values of the sliders
*   **Tools**: When you switch tools
*   **Navigation:** When you expose the tools and hide the tools
*   **In-App Notifications:** When an alert with a message appears

*   **Fix touch responsiveness and behavior of all the sliders** — This one is particularly noticeable for those of you who use Darkroom on iPhone SE-sized devices. A couple of sneaky bugs crept into the codebase and caused a lot of erroneous touches as you dragged the sliders. We also improved the layout of Curves and its handles, to improve the accuracy of which region you manipulate.

It’s a small update, but don’t let its size lull you into a sense of idleness. The oven is full, and it’s working overtime!

Talk to you soon!  
_The Darkroom Team_

It’s Monday in Amsterdam! We’re busy here working along the beautiful canals getting fresh bits ready for your consumption. Fresh out the…

Haptic Feedback


_In these posts, we discuss what’s new in each update and the background behind it. We hope you find these in-depth explorations insightful._

Here in LA, actors like to say “[_One for you, one for me_](https://tribecafilm.com/stories/one-for-me-rachel-weisz)_._” This update started out being a “one for me” update. That is, it’s an update to how we bundle and sell in-app purchases, and I don’t expect longtime fans of the app to be particularly _excited_ about the update. Yet as we fleshed out what this update would include and started implementing it, it started to feel more like “_One for you, AND one for me!_”, making Darkroom easier than ever to use, and fulfilling our desire to help more people than ever become better photographers. Before we get into it though, let’s get the logistics out of the way:

### Changes in this release

*   **Discover & Try:** completely rethought the way to discover and try our Premium Filters and the Pro Color and Curves tools.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__qyZs__yHOq__hqe6KCHYodVw.gif)

*   Now when trying Darkroom’s premium filters and pro tools there’s a single, consistently accessible and discoverable location in the app to purchase the filters and tools.
*   The **Curves** tool now has handles on the curve line to make initial usage more intuitive, and color gradient vertical tracks to help explain the curves handles effect. (partly inspired by [Denny Tang’s Tips video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hnVBqjxUdk) suggesting improvements for Tone Curves Tools).
*   Sliders now have color gradients to explain their effects. This is particularly powerful with the **Split Tone** tool, **Color** tool (Premium Upgrade), and **Temperature** sliders.
*   In the **Color** tool it’s now also easier to understand what color has been changed, and how it has been changed.
*   The **Filters** tool now accommodates the presence of the all available premium filter even without purchasing them so they are easier to discover and try.
*   The **Split Tone** Tool is now free, previously a premium feature, you’ll find it right at the bottom of the Adjustment tool.

### Other Changes

*   Made the header bars in the app smaller to reduce the chrome footprint and focus more on the photos.
*   Adjusted the Crop tool to better fit in iPhone SE-sized devices.
*   Improved the state in which Darkroom didn’t have Photo Access rights, making it clearer and easier to grant access.
*   Improved the states for the Favorite and Edited tabs when no photos are favorited or edited yet.
*   Assorted bug fixes throughout

![](/assets/images/posts/1__iWybOuOi4qQvkJxKhNq__OA.png)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__dyc30uymlT4vyo7HKW__O1A.png)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__9tjI0HcFEMW7u9alQ2ACWg.png)

### Background

Darkroom is an independent and bootstrapped company, built and maintained by two people, and has been for much of its life (Shout-out to [Matt Brown](http://twitter.com/brownthings) who c0-founded the company with me).

![](/assets/images/posts/1__ZsAs4CxdlZs4O7ZtD0zIbA.jpeg)

We’re blessed with Darkroom to have a very healthy and sticky product that’s repeatedly featured by Apple and experiences organic growth. However, to thrive, we need to improve the conversion of our for-pay products.

I’ll admit at this point that I’ve often left monetization to be the last task before a launch. I’m a product-minded person, and I see the world in use-cases and features and bug fixes. I’m not a business-minded person who sees the world primarily in conversion funnels and market opportunities. However, the balance of the two is where a business thrives. My product plans rarely involve monetization and sales, focusing rather on product features and workflow inefficiencies. This is the first time we decided to focus primarily on monetization.

Darkroom’s original business plan was to sell filter packs à la VSCO, and sell Pro Tools à la TouchRetouch. We created a Store and put the filter packs in it, and we put the tools in the toolbar, with a modal to unlock them. Bada-bim, bada-boom, we had a monetization strategy.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__5k__vFamybMeTSJindMtnIQ.png)

We had conversations early on to allow people to try filters and tools before buying them, but we decided against that approach for a few reasons we found convincing at the time:

1.  People might not know how to use Curves/Color, and if they play around with them for a few seconds and achieved an unpleasing effect, they may be turned off from exploring them anyway further.
2.  People would be able to just copy our filters
3.  People would be able to use the tools for free, screenshot the edited image, and bypass our monetization strategy.
4.  By using stock images to promote our tools and filters, we can create an **aspirational** marketing message, as opposed to the **functional** message we’d be sending otherwise.

That conversation happened in 2014.

### The Plan

We had anticipated before starting work on Darkroom that Filter packs would be the primary sellers, and Pro Tools would sell less, but at a higher price. Since then, through natural iteration on the product, the only entry-way into the filter store became the end of the filters list in the filters tool. That meant the path for a person to discover the existence of filter packs looked like this:

`Open app > Tap on a photo > Expand toolbar > Select Filters tool > Scroll past the last filter > Tap on the unlabeled Store icon.`

It doesn’t take a lot of experience with product development to look at that path and assume the conversion between the first step to the last step would be near-zero, and our sales numbers confirmed the fact.

Our tools, the primary differentiator of the app, were similarly hidden. In the toolbar, we had two pink icons, tapping either would present a modal with a single sentence describing the tool, and a few stacked screenshots.

Not to state the obvious, we knew we had some low-hanging fruit to pick. Driven by the understanding that as barriers to entry are lowered, conversion increases. We decided to challenge the assumptions we made in 2014.

1.  If we **assume the people using our app want to do the right thing**, and if we **give them the respect of assuming they’re intelligent and capable photographers**, then we can assume that they understand what the Curves and Color tools do. Furthermore, it’s our job as designers and engineers to make the tools easier to use and understand.
2.  If people want to go through all the steps of transcribing the individual edits of a filter and recreate them later, they likely aren’t the kind of person who would’ve paid for any of them in the first place. **We shouldn’t block dishonest people at the cost of honest people.**
3.  We can easily detect a potentially malicious screenshot to bypass paying for the app. We chose to **turn that into an opportunity** to remind people that Darkroom is a small independent operation.
4.  **The most aspirational message we can give people is the aspiration of becoming professional photographers**. Those who don’t know what Curves and Color correction tools are, are the most capable of learning and growing, and we should help them by providing access to the tools.

That’s why in Darkroom 2.9, **we’ve made every Pro Tool and all Premium Filters available to fully try for all people for free**. We only ask you to pay when you’re happy with your photos and want to share them.

Getting there wasn’t easy. Like any other core product change, it took a lot of iteration to reach the right balance of clarity and usability. In the end, we’re really proud of what we achieved. We hope you like these changes.

![](/assets/images/posts/1____qptF7pLIWyfvM__IxtJvbw.gif)

You can see in this gif of the first pass how visually forceful we made the upsell. What you can’t see is that we made it lock you into the tool you were in.

Clearly, we were still worried about giving away our premium filters and tools so freely to people, but we knew that the intensity of the upsell and the disruption of the lock-in felt wrong in Darkroom. It wasn’t clear what the solution would be. Eventually, after many conversations and iterations, we settled on a color, placement, size, and behavior combination that felt native to Darkroom, and clear to the user.

### The “For You” Part

That was all “For Me”. Now let’s talk about what _you_ have to be excited about.

Since we opened up the tools to every single person who downloads Darkroom, it unleashed an unintended incentive structure.

Because the profile of the person who would be consuming the pro tools has changed, and the context under which they use them has changed, we had to update the design of those core tools to accommodate those people. In the process, we’ve refined and tightened up what was already the best-in-class Curve editor and Color Correction tool.

There were two core philosophies behind these changes:

1.  It should be clear to the person **how they need to interact** with the tools
2.  It should be clear to the person **what the outcome of those interactions will be**.

In Curves, this means knobs on tracks, similar to how sliders work. It also means that the tracks of those sliders visualize the impact of the change.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__XKOQp2XRUASRpIQufe68vA.png)

In Curves, it means gradients on the slider tracks to indicate what color you are shifting to, and increased contrast between which color channels have changed and which have not.

This philosophy really carried over to almost every other part of the app, making Darkroom easier than ever to use, and fulfilling our desire to help more people than ever become better photographers.

Please let us know what you think! We’re so excited to share this with you and have so much more in store.

_The Darkroom Team_

In these posts, we discuss what’s new in each update and the background behind it. We hope you find these in-depth explorations insightful.

The Try-Before-You-Buy Release


This month’s update is a little early. Sometimes, things just work out that way! This one is a little smaller, but it builds on [the work we did in 2.7](/blog/2017-03-darkroom-27). Let me summarize the changes for you:

### Changes in 2.8:

1.  Addressing one of the longest-running UX issues in the app, the navigation bar in Darkroom is finally persistent when in the editing view! You no longer have to swipe down to share, and you no longer have to swipe down twice to go back to the library. This change is enabled by the redesign of the Export flow in 2.7 which dropped the Save as Square photo.
2.  The “Other Services” share dialog now integrates deeply with third party apps. Instead of the plain text Instagram share option, you get the “Copy to Instagram” share option which uses Instagram’s native share dialog. (Thanks @kevinshay for the tip)
3.  Updated the app’s interstitials to disappear faster.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__0J3sQJOIOwJCJY0dsPDNrw.png)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__UMx10hC0hCSeB4ealr3hfA.png)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__xu14WR__V4lW6jRUO2oX9iQ.png)

With the details out of the way, I’d like to share some thoughts about why we made this change and how this update reflects our product philosophy, which you’ll see reflected in the app as we continuously update and revise it.

From the moment Darkroom went from a simple HSL adjustment tool to a full fledged photo editor, it was clear to me that the key to distinguishing the app in the extremely crowded field of iOS photo editors was going to be the speed of the workflow.

I spent months ensuring that the photo editor would be as powerful as Lightroom-in-your-pocket, and as fast and seamless as the native Photos app. We optimized our design process around a metric we called TTF: Time-To-Filter.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__ECF3K84UEJN5Ww9CTZk__bw.png)

One aspect of the workflow we wanted to address as well was the number of apps we, and the photographers we were meeting, were using to get the results they wanted. Photographers were moving from app to app, using individual features from each app. One of those apps, was used to add a white letterbox around a landscape or portrait photo to circumvent Instagram’s square constraint. That app was reduced in Darkroom to a single button; A defining accomplishment of our philosophy.

However, that feature constrained us in an important way: To know what the photo would look like with the border and the inset, you had to see it, which meant the Share experience had to accommodate a full-image preview. When combined with the fact that we were building for an iPhone 5S in 2014 and our own self-imposed constraint to **never** overlay the photo with any UI, we were stuck. We resorted to adding the now-familiar swipe-down-to-share UI, which unfortunately ruined our linear workflow.

In 2.7, acknowledging that the 5/5S/SE form factor was now the minority device size, and that Instagram had long ago dropped its square constraint, we followed suit by removing the Save as Square option. Once we did, we quickly realized that we no longer needed to show a full image preview when sharing, which allowed us to make the navigation bar persistent in 2.8. Now, finally, the workflow in Darkroom is linear: Tap to open a photo, tap to filter, then tap to export, without having to rewind. Tada!

Moving forward, this change will continue to enable us to invest in improving the efficiency of the workflow and how fast you can navigate through your library, make changes, and reflect those edits back into your Camera Roll.

Some really exciting things are in our pipeline, and I’m _dying_ to share them with you ❤

_The Darkroom Team_

This month’s update is a little early. Sometimes, things just work out that way! This one is a little smaller, but it builds on the work we…

Welcome, Darkroom 2.8!


**Note:** _If you want to eat the fish, without learning how to fish, feel free to jump ahead to the “How to Recreate a VSCO Filter” section below. But where’s the fun in that?_

### Introduction

Anyone passionate about photography is familiar with the feeling: You go on a trip, you take heaps of photos every day, then at some point you go through them, either piecemeal or all at once, and you try to identify which you want to edit and what you want them to look like, then you get to work.

What I quickly realized when I was going through that routine two years ago, was how repetitive the process was. I knew I wanted to use VSCO’s M5 filter. It was by far my favorite because of what it did to yellows/greens/blues, but it had some quirks I didn’t care for. It was too warm, and it crushed my highlights.

Putting aside the amount of work involved in identifying which of the photos I wanted to edit in the first place and how much work it took to import them, anyone familiar with VSCO understands the pain of how much work it is to edit multiple photos. I knew there was no technical reason why such a constraint and ineffeciency was necessary. Further, I knew that VSCO’s filters (And all the other filter apps, for that matter), simply operated on the premise of **LUTs** (Look-Up Tables). Before we continue, I think an understanding of what a LUT is and how filters work will really help demystify them.

### An Explanation of Look-Up Tables

Without getting into too many details (Look up the terms for a deeper understanding, no pun intended), the basic premise behind how LUTs work is that a simple image is generated, covering every possible color in the RGB color space. For those unfamiliar with the RGB colorspace, a quick two sentence explanation goes something like this: Color Spaces can be represented as 3-dimensional shapes that contain all colors. RGB is represented as a cube, with each side ranging in value from 0 to 1.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__lOPWqVGl84oTgC1n5zTaTQ.png)

What a Look-Up Table does is it slices that RGB cube into thin slices, and arranges them into a flat image. The flat image is your table in which you “Look up” colors based on their location in the image (How a color relates to a location in the image depends on how you sliced the cube and how you arranged the slices).

![](/assets/images/posts/1__qGDlaRQOCvqzVV2o44lgRw.png)

### How Filters Were Made (Before Darkroom)

So, now that you know what a color space is, and you know what a look-up table looks like, we can get back to filters.

I’m not sure what they’re technically called, but for the sake of this article, let’s call them **filter artists.**

What a filter artist does traditionally, is that they open a sample photo, and then they manually edit it to accomplish a look they’re happy with. They might have a bank of images that contain multiple colors and multiple tones, so they tune the edits to each subject matter, but they’re using Photoshop tools to manipulate the image.

Once they’re happy with how their edits are affecting their bank of images, they save those edits, and they apply them to the unedited LUT, which looks a lot like the sample I showed you.

That edited LUT is suddenly valuable. It encodes all the edits of the filter artist, and it defines the filter. Remember how the RGB cube represents all the colors possible in RGB? Well, because the LUT is generated from the cube, the LUT also contains every color. Now, this is where it gets tricky.

The brilliance of the LUT image above isn’t that it contains every single color. The brilliance of the LUT is that **it contains two sets of information.** This nugget of information is crucial to understand. The LUT image obviously contains the colors in the pixels of the image. **The second set of information a LUT image contains is how the location of the pixels in the image relate to colors as well.**

Here’s an example: The top-left pixel in the LUT I shared earlier is at location (0,0). That pixel, is black. Those are the two important pieces of information. We know for a fact, that whatever pixel is at location (0,0), it was black in the unmodified LUT. If that LUT is passed through Photoshop and the shadows of a photo were brightened, then that black pixel is no longer perfectly black, it’s a little gray. There’s your two pieces of information! The knowledge that location (0,0) should be black, means the actual color at that pixel can be different. That before/after is your **mapping of the filter**.

When an app like VSCO ships, it ships with a set of LUTs that have been passed through a series of editing steps that make up the individual filters. When you apply one of those filters onto one of your photos, the app goes through your photo **pixel by pixel** and look up the color of that pixel. If that color is black, it knows to look at the LUT at location (0,0) because that’s where the original black color in the LUT should be, and it reads what color is that location in the LUT. The app then replaces the original color of the image with the one in the LUT. Ta-da! You just applied the M5 filter to your photo.

### The Limitations of the LUT approach

Congratulations, you now know how to build a photo editing application. The simplicity of this approach is why there are so many photo editing applications on iOS, and why some of them have so many filters. Each app can be slightly different from the others by adding a feature here or there, or by hiring really good filter artists, but they’re all fundamentally the same:

> **Import > Open > Apply Filter > Save**

From an app developer’s perspective, this is great: Modify a LUT, send the image down to people’s devices, and they have a new filter! Charge them a few dollars for it, pop some champagne. From a photographer’s perspective however, this is less than ideal. What happens if, like my example with M5 in the intro, **the filter does not match my expectations or style?** You’re out of luck. You and twenty million other people are all sharing the same LUTs, and all your photos look the same. If you want to use their auxiliary tools to fix the shortcomings of the filter, then you just introduced tons of repetitive work to your editing process.

Obviously, I’m the creator of Darkroom, a photo editing app. This is where I zoom out from the technical details of how filters work, and explain to you why Darkroom is different.

### **The Darkroom Difference: No Look-Up Tables**

The big innovation with Darkroom was to take the same tools that the filter artists use to generate the LUTs, and to port them to your phone. **In Darkroom, filters are instructions for generating the color mapping on the fly.**

Here’s where this comes into play: Suppose I apply Darkroom’s `A100`filter on my photo, but the rich green tones in the shadows aren’t working for me. **In Darkroom, I can apply the filter, then use the Curves tool to alter the filter itself.** If I see myself doing the same thing repeatedly, I can save those new instructions as my very own filter. Because Darkroom skips the import flow of all the other apps, my editing flow is thus reduced to:

> Open > Apply Filter > Save

Except, the Filter I’m applying is my own, containing all my custom edits.

Now that the fundamental concepts of how LUTs, colorspaces, traditional filters, and Darkroom filters all work is out of the way, let’s get back to the original point.

### _How to Recreate a VSCO Filter_

Technically speaking, you can pass a blank LUT through any filter on any app and end up with the same LUT the app uses internally. That doesn’t really mean anything, and it isn’t really very useful. To recreate a VSCO filter in Darkroom, we’re going to need to approximate the instructions used to generate the LUT in the first place. Put another way, **we have a meal, and we’re trying to guess the recipe.**

To do this, we’re going to need to be familiar with the [Curves tool](/blog/2015-06-curves-part-1-of-2), and the [Color tool](/blog/2015-08-color-tool) in Darkroom. The former modifies the tones, the latter modifies the colors. Since these are the primary tools used for creating filters in Photoshop and Lightroom, we will generate a **specific color palette** which we will use to isolate changes to those two tools.

![](/assets/images/posts/1______DOfUxGTOwtPFpNuJ4EFA.png)

In Darkroom, the Curves tool is divided into five regions (Blacks, Shadows, Midtones, Highlights, and Whites). That’s why the first row in the palette is divided as it is. They’re desaturated, because we want to isolate the impact of tonal adjustments from color adjustments.

The Color tool however is divided into eight color channels, represented here in the second row.

### Step 1: Match Tones

Simply download that palette to your phone, import it to VSCO, and pass it through your favorite filter. In this case, we’ll be recreating F2.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__3MR9LiEcB7lKaCo4pCvXDA.png)

Next, move the edited image back to your computer using AirDrop. We’re going to need to read the values of those pixels. There are lots of tools available for doing just that, my favorite is [xScope](http://xscopeapp.com).

Open the edited image, and read the values of the gray boxes in order. Here’s what it looks like to use xScope on the Black square, and how the value appear:

![](/assets/images/posts/1__7iY6g__HM0NCo9r0T6YWA__Q.png)

You can see on the left, the values of `R:0.13 G:0.14 B:0.17` Those numbers reflect the impact of the filter on black colors, absent any color-specific adjustments. Switch to Darkroom and go to the Curves tool, apply those numbers to the Red, Green, and Blue curves respectively:

![](/assets/images/posts/1__1Srd7wzhasVs7Xnrjaio4g.png)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__lu6SCrnfonz8COQujVjV3A.png)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__Nhdwtla4aTwgLEYSAHkD9w.png)

You can see how by the time I added the Blue curve adjustment, the black square already matched the VSCO-edited palette.

Now, repeat the process for the four other tone regions:

![](/assets/images/posts/1____T5__WIylwiqCIdjYQrytaA.png)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__Ij58oXsP017L2S2UU0PgwQ.png)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__qDMzz__UMoav0c3i5bFOMaQ.png)

Et Voila! We’ve already gotten pretty far!

This is the end of the robotic part of the process. Now we’re on to the subjective and more intuitive part of the process.

### Step 2: Match Colors

After matching the Red, Green, and Blue curves in Darkroom, export the palette onto your computer. Name the two images (VSCO F2 and Darkroom F2) so you can differentiate them. Open both in a photo viewing app (I’m using Sketch.app, and compare:

![](/assets/images/posts/1__0PFZN7Rqa535afroFRn0BA.png)

You can see the top bar matches closely, but the colors at the bottom are off. The colors in the VSCO filter appear less saturated across the board, and they appear darker across the board as well. This is where we start experimenting. Since we have no way of knowing what the recipe is, we have to keep guessing until we get close enough.

It’s important to remember when you’re doing this activity that your goal isn’t to recreate the VSCO filter _exactly._ You want to emulate the VSCO filter’s _character._ It doesn’t have to match. Looking at the palette, the difference is huge, and that’s good, because we’re using it as a tool, yet even without adjusting for the colors, the curves get us most of the way through to the final character of the F2 filter:

![](/assets/images/posts/1__GTXLYLTq1WG5SmTuGf7QGA.png)

There are some differences, notably the saturation of the shadow that the side mirror is casting on the door, but it’s the same _in character_.

With a little bit more work, we can get much closer though. Since saturation appears to be low across the board, let’s knock it down in Darkroom’s **Basic Adjustments** tool (The default one with all the sliders). We don’t know how much to adjust it, so it could take a couple of back-and-forths of AirDrop’ing the updated palette and comparing again.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__ReNTptWT__8G8j5CrI__xVqA.png)

Now, we can see that the Red, Purple, and Pink colors are fairly close, but the Yellow and Green colors are noticeably darker in VSCO, and the blue appears even more desaturated.

To fix the color-specific channels, go to the Color tool, and adjust the Saturation and Luminance of the ones with differences. Again, it might take a few iterations to get it right, but take your time, you’ll see progress quickly!

Here are the changes I ended up making to match:

![](/assets/images/posts/1__XWEhftEtk1HEXMVUSpFMsw.png)

And here’s how they stand next to the original VSCO Palette:

![](/assets/images/posts/1__DWk1BazAG3ZMjp__TM__xcGQ.png)

Quite close! Not bad for a few minutes of work. But, there’s one crucial step left!

### Step 3: Matching The Character

When I was making the edits, I was uncomfortable by how hard I had to push the luminance on the yellow and green channels to match the VSCO palette. I wanted my first test to be with a green-heavy photo:

![](/assets/images/posts/1__nGxFI__3S8sNMROWGPprTMw.png)

Just as I had suspected, the greens and yellows are far too dark.

The thing to remember, is that Darkroom is a tool. Toolmakers, by their very nature, have to make decisions along the process of building tools that impact the behavior of the tools. For some things, standard mathematical definitions exist to define a tool. Those tools behave identically everywhere. Most of the time however, the tools behave subjectively. For example, a developer building a Saturation tool needs to define _how_ colors get desaturation. We have an intuitive understanding of how it works, but at the end of the day, what does a desaturated yellow look like, and how does it look different from a desaturation red?

That’s where the conversation of _character of a filter_ comes back. We want to match the filter by feel, not by technicality.

I upped the luminance of the green and yellow, et voila!

![](/assets/images/posts/1__INwUxVo9rRpwmEamLanXEw.png)

It’s still not exact, to be clear, but it doesn’t have to be, not should it be. This is a base, a foundation, on which you build, iterate, make your own. You have learned how to fish, now go catch a big one and feed your whole photography family!

### Conclusion

I’ve uploaded the filter created in this tutorial to our server so you can download it and play with it. I named the filter “Charlie” after the [Twitter user](https://twitter.com/charliedeets) who turned me onto this rant in the first place. If you have the Darkroom app installed on your phone, tap the link below and it’ll open the app and install the filter.

### To install the Charlie filter, paste this in MobileSafari on a phone with Darkroom installed:

> darkroom:///install\_filter?id=547

_p.s. One last tip when doing something like this: I suggest creating filters every time you export a photo with changes from Darkroom, and matching the file name to the name of the filter. I number my attempts like commits in a git code repository. It took 9 attempts to match this filter. Enjoy the process!_

_The Darkroom Team_

Note: If you want to eat the fish, without learning how to fish, feel free to jump ahead to the “How to Recreate a VSCO Filter” section…

Recreating VSCO Filters in Darkroom


Following through on our promise last month to pick up the pace of updates, we’re excited to share with you the biggest update since Darkroom 2 was launched. Darkroom 2.7 is here, and with it a bunch of new UI updates, and a brand new, marquee feature: **Filter Backup & Restore.**

### Here’s Filter Backup & Restore Works

People repeatedly tell us in feedback how attached they become to their custom filters in Darkroom. Those filters, used time and again, have become an essential part of our customers’ online brands, and expression of their personality, and a core part of their photograhy life. That’s why we’re so excited to finally address one of the most requested features by our users with the launch of Filter Backup & Restore.

Like everything else in Darkroom, the beauty is in the simplicity of the feature. All you need to use the feature is an active iCloud account, and you’re all set up to use it! Simple go to **Settings**, then tap **Backup Filters.** Ta da! That’s all you need to do!

In the background, Darkroom uploads your user filters to Apple’s secure iCloud servers where only you have access to your private files.

Here’s the magic trick: Because you can log in to the same iCloud account on multiple devices, it means **you can restore your backups on all your devices!** Think of it as a manual syncing of your user-filters!

### Other Big Little Changes

We’ve completely redesigned the Share experience, and we’ve renamed it to “Export”. Along the way, we’ve dropped sharing to explicit third party apps, and we’ve dropped the “Save as Square Photo” feature.

When we launched Darkroom 2, Instagram still had a square limitation. That meant anyone who wanted to own their composition was forced to use any number of apps and intermediate steps to add a white border to make a square photo contain a non-square photo with a white border. In our effort to streamline the mobile photographer’s workflow, we integrated that feature right into Darkroom, and we made it as easy as a single button.

Since then however, a couple of things have changed. Obviously, Instagram now allows you to share non-square photos, but also, sharing directly to third party apps has stopped being supported as well, meaning the custom metadata we were able to share was no longer allowed. Finally, our data indicated that the vast majority of users simply never used those features. So, as per our iterative product philosophy, we’re taking time to trim features and improve the performance of the app, rather than throw the kitchen sink at the problem.

We’re really proud of the community we’ve built around Darkroom and we love hearing from you about how you use Darkroom and what you’d love to see in it. Please don’t hestitate to share your thoughts with us at feedback@bergen.co

### Full Release Notes

*   Added Backup and Restore for your custom filters! Now simply go to Settings and manually Backup your custom filter creations, and easily Restore when either upgrading to a new or extra device. The only requirement is an active iCloud account!
*   Renamed “Share” to “Export” for clarity. We also redesigned and simplified the export experience.
*   Removed the Save as Square and third-party share shortcuts from Export. You will find the same options under “Other Services”
*   Swapped out the custom font we used for Apple’s lovely system standard San Francisco font ([https://developer.apple.com/fonts/](https://developer.apple.com/fonts/)).
*   All our in app icons have been updated to be a touch friendlier (softer corners), to be simpler (fewer objects), and where tweaked where possible to better explain their function.

_The Darkroom Team_

Following through on our promise last month to pick up the pace of updates, we’re excited to share with you the biggest update since…

Introducing Darkroom 2.7


Let’s get to the fun stuff first: To celebrate Darkroom’s 2 year anniversary, we’re announcing a **30% sale across the board for 1 week only**. Open up the app, go buy all those filter packs and tools you’ve been putting off at a discount. **Hurry!**

We’re also sharing a new house-keeping update: Darkroom 2.6. It won’t impact your Darkroom experience much, but it addresses a bunch of issues some of our users have been dealing with and reporting. Here’s the low-down:

### Darkroom 2.6 Changelog:

*   When rotating an image that hasn’t explicitly been cropped the cropped area now remains the maximum size. Previously, the crop region would not rotate with the image.
*   The As Shot option in the Crop tool now properly resets to the maximum size.
*   The “Buy ProKit” flow has been updated to be less confusing, making it clearer you can either just buy ProKit or use our Limited-Time Offer to buy everything at a discount.
*   The on-boarding flow for new users got an update, making the whole process shorter, and making restoring your previous purchases much simpler.
*   In Settings there now is a Help section available with easy access to tutorials and frequently asked questions and our Darkroom Sunday School tutorials.

## Now Let Me Get Sentimental

On this day two years ago, Matt Brown and I got into work early and launched Darkroom after 8 months of hard work. We watched as country after country around the world lit up with little red dots marking the app being featured by Apple in the iTunes Store internationally, and validating our decision to localize the app in 11 languages.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__0IEJJ8hSyvaCAPYdd7s3cw.jpeg)

![](/assets/images/posts/1__JuAK9d3Zj3SF8LMdwSJNQg.jpeg)

The premise behind the app was two fold:

> Editing workflows are inefficient, and creative tools are limiting

Two year ago, Snapseed, VSCO, and Afterlight were the dominant players. In large part, they defined the space, and set its standards. But as iOS and the camera evolved, the needs and the scale of mobile photography exploded, and the tools remained stagnant. Darkroom was born out of our frustration with the status quo, and our vision for what mobile photography is capable of. Darkroom’s success has validated that our premise was true back then, and it continues to be true today.

That premise upon which we built Darkroom manifested itself in two ways: **No-import editing**, and **Custom Filters.** Apple recognized our innovation a month after our launch, when they named Darkroom the **Best App of February.**

Press coverage was unanimously positive:

[**Darkroom For iOS is The Photo App You Always Wanted**  
_Darkroom, a new photo app for iOS which was released today, hopes to bring some pro-level tools to the iPhone and…_thenextweb.com](https://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/02/13/darkroom-ios-advanced-photo-app-youve-always-wanted/ "https://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/02/13/darkroom-ios-advanced-photo-app-youve-always-wanted/")[](https://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/02/13/darkroom-ios-advanced-photo-app-youve-always-wanted/)

[**Darkroom: A New iOS Photo Editor with DIY Filters, Curves, and Infinite History**  
_Darkroom is a new photo editor for iPhones that just launched today. The app offers a number of powerful features for…_petapixel.com](https://petapixel.com/2015/02/12/darkroom-ios-photo-editing-app-diy-filters-curves-infinite-history/ "https://petapixel.com/2015/02/12/darkroom-ios-photo-editing-app-diy-filters-curves-infinite-history/")[](https://petapixel.com/2015/02/12/darkroom-ios-photo-editing-app-diy-filters-curves-infinite-history/)

[**Best New Apps: Darkroom**  
_A number of us here at The Verge are big fans of VSCO cam, myself included. But I'm never completely satisfied with the…_www.theverge.com](http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/12/8025141/best-photo-editing-app-darkroom-iphone "http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/12/8025141/best-photo-editing-app-darkroom-iphone")[](http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/12/8025141/best-photo-editing-app-darkroom-iphone)

Six months after our initial launch, after the dust settled, we got back to work on Darkroom 2. Truth be told, Darkroom 2 is what we wanted to launch originally, but we made the decision to space it out, validate our core propositions and assumptions before investing more deeply into the long-tail of features.

That’s why only six months after the release of the first Darkroom, we announced Darkroom 2, featuring a whopping **14 new features.** With its launch, we finally hit our initial goal: To give mobile photographers the same tools that filter editors use to create filters. They can become masters of their own style.

In December, when they named Darkroom a **Best New App of 2015** and featured it in their global **Make Something New** ad campaign.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__CdorBWRS7A4EXxzL9Gyrbw.png)

In a final show of support, Darkroom was installed on all iPhone across the world in Apple stores as a demo app.

## The Long Quiet

Whereas Darkroom’s first year was defined by activity, releases, tutorials, and awards, Darkroom’s second year has been defined by inaction and silence.

Darkroom at various points was either a two-man operation, or a one-man operation with advisors after Matt left the company. So, while Darkroom was going through all this activity, across the Atlantic, the migrant crisis was unfolding.

As a Syrian-American, I took it upon myself to document the ciris that was affecting my family and many of the people I grew up with. I enlisted the skills of my friend [Sara Kerens](https://www.sarakerens.com/) and we both spent 10 weeks to document the crisis in a [photo book](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1093122046/displaced-stories-from-the-syrian-diaspora?ref=user_menu).

During that time, I took a break from Darkroom. Truth be told, I anticipated the project taking no more than 3 months when I set out on it. Now however, 14 months later, I could not have been more wrong. In those 14 months, work on Darkroom all but ceased. I was consumed with the book and ensuring that we do justice to the project and the subject matter.

Yet despite this lack of activity, Darkroom has been extremely resilient. More than just that in fact, it has thrived. Writers continue writing about it. Photographers continue using it, and new photographers continue to discover how powerful and efficient mobile photo editing is with Darkroom.

[**The best photo editing app for the iPhone - The Sweet Setup**  
_For the past month, we've been experimenting with two dozen of the best-rated photo manipulation apps for iOS. It's a…_thesweetsetup.com](http://thesweetsetup.com/apps/best-photo-editing-app-iphone "http://thesweetsetup.com/apps/best-photo-editing-app-iphone")[](http://thesweetsetup.com/apps/best-photo-editing-app-iphone)

The trust that our early adopters have demonstrated in the product and the excitement that our new adopters share with us has kept our spirits high and our commitment strong.

## The Long Run Forward

There will be a longer-form article in the future to describe in more detail what the future of Darkroom will look like, but I wanted to use this opportunity to share a high level vision.

We’ve watched time and again mobile photo editing apps launch, find early success, and then ultimately go down one of two paths: The Kitchen-Sink, or The Social Network. The reason is quite simple: Economics. The economics of mobile applications are brutal. Depending on whether or not the developer decided to take on external venture funding, they either have to continuously release new in-app purchases, often resorting to novelty, or pursue hockey-stick user growth at all costs.

It is in our estimation that this ecosystem starves the market of useful, thoughtful, professional-grade tools that address structural problems in the life of professional creatives.

Bergen, the parent company of Darkroom which I started 2.5 years ago, has always operated under the following banner:

> Creative Tools for Creative Professionals

So often in today’s climate, creative professionals are left behind as the pursuit of growth gradually opens up the target audience and tries to make something everybody wants. In the end, we have tools that do many things nobody needs.

We do not divide the world into consumers and professionals. We divide the world into **professionals** and **aspiring professionals**. We want to enable professionals to do their job well, efficiently, and consistently. Similarly, we want to enable aspiring professionals to elevate themselves by lowering the expectation gap.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__B__a51qtXwhpcQV5ebM__1qA.jpeg)

This philosophy will continue to manifest itself in Darkroom moving forward, and I can’t wait to share more about this vision with you in time. Meanwhile, expect more regular updates as we pick up the pace again.

Until the next time, happy editing!
_The Darkroom Team_

Let’s get to the fun stuff first: To celebrate Darkroom’s 2 year anniversary, we’re announcing a 30% sale across the board for 1 week only…

Darkroom’s 2 Year Anniversary Celebration


Friends, It’s been a while since we last talked. Darkroom 2.4 was released in mid-October of last year. A full explanation for the delay will come later, I’ll keep this post as concise as the update itself. Suffice it to say we’re busy working on the next big update, and early indications are that it’s going to be a very big and awesome update. Can’t wait to share more details with you!

**Changes in 2.5:**

*   Fixes a bug where photos on 4" devices (iPhone 5, 5S, and 5SE) had the wrong aspect ratio
*   Fixes a bug where the app won’t load on iOS 10 Beta 5
*   Fixes a bug where photos won’t load on iPads
*   Removes the filter sharing option (This was a seldom-used feature that was very expensive when starting up the app)
*   Fixes bugs with loading of URLs in Settings

_The Darkroom Team_

Friends, It’s been a while since we last talked. A full explanation for the delay will come later, I’ll keep this post as concise.

Darkroom 2.5 Update


The tone is going to be a bit different for this one. If you’ve checked your App Store updates recently, you may or may not have seen me basically have a meltdown in the release notes. I owe you an update, an apology, and an explanation.

Let’s start on a high note:

## Introducing Darkroom 2.1

I’m thrilled to have released Darkroom 2.1 a week ago. Here’s what was new:

**TIFF Support**

We’ve listened to your feedback, and we’ve added the ability to edit (but not export…yet) TIFF files! In earlier versions of Darkroom, this was accidentally, half-way supported. In Darkroom 2 we removed this functionality, and were surprised by how many people edit TIFFs in Darkroom, so we re-enabled it.

**Sort by Date Added**

![](/assets/images/posts/1__EHtPOw__ECwi8cNeB96E2FQ.png)

This has been personally frustrating me for a long time. When Matt and I were first developing Darkroom, we wanted to mimick the behavior of the Photos app. When iOS 8 came out, it turns out there are two feeds of your photos: Moments, and All Photos. One was sorted by the capture date, and one was sorted by the modified date. If you were editing an old photo and you saved a copy, its capture date was still old, so it was hidden in your library. Worse, if you added a photo to your iPhone that was captured earlier (Like, through Dropbox), those photos were also hidden in the list of photos.

Now, in the Album Selector, you have the option of sorting by Date Added, or Date Created (Still the default). The choice is sticky, meaning when you change it, that change will hold, even if you restart the app.

**Conserve Battery**

A lot of users reported that Darkroom was consuming large amounts of battery. That’s because for heavy users, the sliders were re-rendering the image hundreds of times over the course of a single adjustment. For fast phones, this isn’t a problem at all — The phone might get a bit hot, but it’s no biggie. On slower devices however, the devices were having trouble keeping up with the increased demands of Darkroom 2. So we added a new “Conserve Battery” setting that is on by default on iPhone 5, 5C, and 4S. When turned on, this setting disables the live preview of the sliders.

We encourage you to play with it. Over the course of this feature’s development, we were surprised how big of an impact it made on our editing process. By disabling the live preview, you’re able to see the before and after of each individual adjustment more clearly, since the change is not incremental.

Happy times, right?

## Introducing Darkroom 2.2

Well, we released Darkroom 2.1 then this happened:

![](/assets/images/posts/1__gBF7u9ujPJRAm__cgPiyrjQ.png)

That, friends, is a graph of our crash rate. Guess when Darkroom 2.1 came out.

Anywho, turns out the code we were using to detect which device model you were using had a [race condition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_condition) that could cause slower devices to crash. Suffice it to say, your valiant knight got on the case, and promptly fixed the issue.

Now I can relax and celebrate, right?

## Introducing Darkroom 2.3

The day after, I start getting reports of features being broken on iOS 9. Turns out, due to me being on vacation in New York City and then busy with [another project](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1093122046/displaced-stories-from-the-syrian-diaspora) I’ve been working on, I didn’t test iOS 9 as thoroughly as I should have. In fact, I didn’t do much testing, assuming that the lack of complaints from existing beta testers was an indication that there wasn’t a problem. That is a completely amateur mistake on my part, and I apologize for the inconvenience it has caused you in using Darkroom.

Anyway, Darkroom 2.3 fixes the blocking issues. There are still a couple of issues but they’re low-priority and I’m fixing them as I write this. Well, not at the same time, but you know what I mean.

I’ll send out an update in the next few days on the new project I’m working on, and it’ll explain why things have been a bit hectic. Thank you so much for using Darkroom. I love you.

_The Darkroom Team_

The tone is going to be a bit different for this one. If you’ve checked your App Store updates recently, you may or may not have seen me…

Darkrooms 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3

_A whole new app_

<YoutubeEmbed id="iduyT-FE7UQ" />



It’s finally here! Darkroom 2 is a milestone release with more than 14 new features covering every area of the product, an updated design reflecting the focus and simplicity of Darkroom, and an updated brand.

> [Grab a download hot off the presses!](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/darkroom-photo-editor/id953286746?mt=8)

Building on the foundation and promise we laid out with our initial release and based on your invaluable feedback, Darkroom 2 is a mature, full-featured photo editor that truly brings the power of professional photo editing within the grasp of the casual mobile photographer.

There’s a lot to be said, and a lot to be shown, so let’s jump in and touch on all the new goodness. Here are the major new features of Darkroom 2.

# The Pro Kit

Curves, our innovative and radically easy-t0-use curve editor is joined by two new professional-grade editing tools: **Color** and **Tone**, all packaged together into a single In-App Purchase along with **Filter Sharing (**more on that below**)**.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__cPKkPQgJQkEjB__Dgx61zeQ.gif)

## The Color Tool

Unleashing the full expressive range of desktop-grade color grading, the Color tool provides the ability to **adjust the hue, saturation, and luminance of individual colors**. The sky is too blue? Desaturate the blue. The grass is too yellow? Pull up the green hue.

When combined with the Curves tool, filters in Darkroom take on a whole new dimension. An entire range of cross processed filters become possible, and the depth of emotion and tonality you can achieve is stunning.

As a courtesy to our early supporters, photographers who purchased Curves will get the Pro Kit as an automatic and free upgrade.

# Filter Sharing

![](/assets/images/posts/1__bfd2ub1ZSeKWh__ZcoLE1Tg.png)

Included as part of the Pro Kit In-App Purchase, you can now **share your custom filters** publicly using our unique one-step install mechanism. Using an on-image code, you can share your filters to your friends and followers on Instagram, and they can install them right from within their feed by taking a screenshot. That’s it! As your filters spread, photographers will have a link back to your Instagram profile, helping you build an audience and a following.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__CKTup0BZx8NFZ__U75AaS8Q.jpeg)


Every week, we will feature the best shared filter, shining a spotlight on a variety of styles and techniques, building a community around a shared love of photography.

# Premium Filter Packs

Darkroom has always shipped with 12 premium filters right off the bat. These filters are all updated given the new capabilities of the Pro Kit, and they’re joined by **four new premium filter packs** available for purchase within the Darkroom Store.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__ImKoi78b6WB34cw7TgqW0g.png)


We spent weeks iterating on these filter packs making sure that they cover a wide range of looks and and styles, and making sure they reflect modern tastes and styles. These filter packs are named after their intended styles or use-cases.

# Workflow 2.0

Darkroom’s core premise is that the best photo editor is one that combines workflow innovation as much as editing tools. To that end, we’ve supercharged Darkroom’s workflow capabilities with version 2. Here are the highlights

## Favorite & Delete

Now you can favorite and delete any photo while viewing it, helping you cut down on the clutter in your camera roll, and manage it as it grows over time. **These changes are integrated to the system-wide iOS library**.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__uNqmRSJCGIfJqoR6BzqZoA.png)

Alongside favoriting and deleting, we’ve introduced two new sections to the main library view: Favorites, and Edited, to help you manage and curate your photo library. Within each photo, you can now favorite and delete, and **your actions are integrated into Apple’s core iOS photo library.**

In addition, you can now **Copy & Paste** the edits of one photo onto another, and when sharing, you can **Save** the image without having a duplicate in the library.

## New Share Services

To further reduce clutter in your camera roll, Darkroom 2 adds “**Save**” as a new share option, overwriting the original photo in your system library, which allows you to continue editing in other applications without duplicates.

![](/assets/images/posts/1____ohR9KXF658eMLBQONms9A.png)

Also, Save as Square Photo, our radically simple one-button solution to share non-square photos to Instagram now gains the ability to inset the photo to provide borders.

# Full List of Changes

Phew! Quite the list, and that’s just the major changes! Here’s a list of all the new features in Darkroom 2:

*   Color Tool
*   Tone Tool
*   Filter Sharing
*   Premium Filter Packs
*   Filter Strength
*   Favorite Photo
*   Delete Photo
*   Library Sections
*   Add inset to Square Photo
*   Modify Original Photo / Revert to Original
*   Copy & Paste Edits
*   Revamped and much improved Brightness and Contrast algorithms
*   Rename Filter
*   Reset Filter / Update Filter
*   5:4 and 4:5 aspect ratio support
*   … and many bug fixes and design improvements throughout.

We hope you enjoy using Darkroom 2. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at feedback@bergen.co

_The Darkroom Team_

A whole new app,  with more than 14 new features, an updated design and brand reflecting the focus and simplicity of Darkroom.

Introducing Darkroom 2


_We’re back! After a short hiatus to get Darkroom 2 releases, Sunday School is back! We’ll continue exploring mobile photography through the lens of Darkroom._

Have you all gotten a chance to upgrade to Darkroom 2 yet? If you haven’t you’ll need it to follow along. While you’re at it, make sure you buy the Pro Kit. We’re running a special offer which unlocks all the premium filter packs as well, all for 50% off the full price.

> [Grab a copy of Darkroom 2 now from the App Store.](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/darkroom-photo-editor/id953286746?mt=8)

Phew. Ok. Let’s dig in.

## What is the Color Tool?

![](/assets/images/posts/1__cPKkPQgJQkEjB__Dgx61zeQ.gif)

Generally speaking, photo editing tools slice up the photo in different ways, and allows you target your edits to those slices. For example: Curves allows you to adjust the color of different tonal regions of the photo, vignette the brightness of the corners, and Color allows you adjust the tone of individual colors in the photo. The more granular the slice, the more control you have.

In the gif, you can see that we are adjusting the Hue and the Saturation of the yellow colors in the photos. New York City cabs being mostly yellow, they take on a very stronger orange hue in the process.

## When to use Color

The ability to adjust the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance of individual colors is fundamental and central to the ability to create unique and interesting filters. Saturation and Luminance are indredibly powerful when you want to guide the viewer’s eye towards your focal point: If you shot a portrait and the trees in the background are drawing too much attention, adjusting their saturation and luminance can add contrast and focus attention on your subject.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__i0LZzsQzmvGuctDzOcXzlw.png)

Hue on the other hand, serves two purposes: Corrective, and artistic. Depending on the lighting conditions and white balance when you took the photo, you may need to fix a color cast in one part of the image. On the other hand, subtly shifting the hue of a color can dramatically alter the soul and the emotion of photograph.

## How to use Color

The editing process in Darkroom typically starts by selecting a filter. With the 20 premium filters that launched alongside Darkroom 2, you now have over 30 filters to pick a starting look from. We categorized them based on intended use-case (A landscape filter is not going to look great on a Potrait) to make the selection process more seamless. Next, light is typically adjusted using Brightness and Contrast and Curves, and finally, Color comes in at the end to adjust the feel and tone of the photo. The process isn’t always linear, and a good deal of back and forth may be necessary, but generally speaking, the tools are laid out in the order they’re typically used.

Because the Color tool divides the photo into its various color channels, those typically correspond to the various elements in the photo. In a landscape: Look at the sky, how blue is it? How blue do you want it to be? Desaturating the sky puts more focus on the ground and gives the photo a slightly darker mood. Increasing the Luminance of the sky usually adds contrast to a photo where the sky and the ground are in the same tonal range and may be hard to separate using Curves.

The color selector is split into two halves: Original color, and Modified color. As you adjust the hue, saturation, and luminance of any, the bottom half of the circle reflects the new color. Play around with it, you have an infinite history that catches any mistakes you make :)

**_Pro Tip:_** _Play around with the neighboring colors. Sometimes the color of an object is made up of multiple colors and you can separate them out using the Color tool. For example, try desaturating Aqua (between Blue and Green and see what it does to the photo!) and see what it does to the blue of the sky!_

## A Note on Cross Processing

Back in the days of film photography, when you were developing the strip of film from your camera into negatives you can then print, you had to follow a specific chemical formula and process that was specific to the type of film you were using. If you used a chemical process for a different type of film, you typically ended up with often-unpredictable shifts in color and hue that spawned a whole generation of artistic expression.

The Color Tool is essential for shifting the colors in your image across the hue spectrum and creating unique film-like filters. If Curves is the backbone of filters, Color is the soul, and body. We play around with this in the XPro premium filter pack.

You can read more on Lomography’s “[What the hell is Cross Processing](http://crossprocessing.info)?”

Happy Editing!

Sunday School #8: We’re back! Color allows you adjust the tone of individual colors in the photo. The more granular the slice, the more control you have.

Meet The Color Tool


_This is the eighth installment in our weekly series exploring mobile photography through the lens of Darkroom. You_ [_can view all the articles here._](/blog/)

I’ve been excited about this one for a couple of months, ever since we finalized work on the Color Tool which recently launched with Darkroom 2. With Tone and Color, Black and White editing is now supercharged in Darkroom.

Black and White photos are a category of photos all on their own and can evoke very powerful emotional responses and elevate a photograph when done well. Mastering it puts yet another tool in your photography tool belt.

Black and White photography is particularly powerful for a couple of reasons. From a technical perspective, by reducing one of the variables in the photo (color), you eliminate an entire category of potential pitfalls and mistakes, and can focus on the value (used here in the artistic sense of “Amount of lightness and darkness”) and learn how to see and judge the value of a scene before you even take a photo. This “photographer’s eye” — An ability to imagine what the photograph will look like — is a fundamental skill.

From a more artistic sense, when you remove color from a photo, you divorce it from reality, and allow the user to project into the photo. When the photograph loses color, it becomes a representation of what the photographer was seeing, and not a documentation of the scene. This is one of the reasons why B&W movies from the pre-Technicolor days look so romantic to us.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__hcm6g4q2Jtm7LwCsLSwUSw.jpeg)

There are two large topics that can be discussed when it comes to Black and White Photography: The technicalities of working in Black and White, and the artistic choices to make and how they influence the photo. The latter is a much broader topic that hinges on personal style and tastes. We may get into it in a future post, or multiple posts, by profiling individual photographers and their personal styles. This article will focus on the technicalities of working with Black and White photos in Darkroom.

Ok, let’s get into it: Drag that Saturation slider all the way to the left and make that photo black and white.

## Contrast

In our [two](/blog/2015-06-curves-part-1-of-2)\-[part](/blog/2015-07-curves-part-2-of-2) Using Curves posts, we discussed how the RGB curve can be used to selectively add and remove contrast the various tonal ranges of the photo. The image being Black and White, you don’t have to worry about impact on saturation when editing the curve. Feel free to experiment here, you have more lattitude to make adjustments.

In the aforementioned two part series on Using Curves, we discussed the difference between using the Contrast slider and the RGB Curve. Much of that applies here. Namely: The Contrast slider is a global predefined adjustment, whereas the RGB Curve allows you to selectively apply contrast to different parts of the image by forming your own S-curve with its own steepness and it’s own steepest-point. The same applies to Brightness. Here’s an example of how the Brightness tool crushes the shadows, while the selective RGB Curve adjustment maintained the information.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__1Tiiaac59PxpffbPLMiq6Q.png)

## Luminance

This section carries on the chat about contrast, but it’s pretty fun to play around with and it’s [new in Darkroom 2](/blog/2015-08-introducing-darkroom-20), so it felt like it needed its own section.

[The Color tool](/blog/2015-08-color-tool) includes one of my favorite hidden power-user features in Darkroom 2: **The ability to edit the luminance of color channels in Black and White Photos**.

This takes a bit of explanation. The order in which a photo editor applies the edits is very important in really taking advantage of the tool. For example, if the Color tool was applied after Saturation, then the Color tool won’t be able to differentiate between the various colors. However, the Color Tool in Darkroom 2 is applied _before_ the Saturation tool, which means you can use it to adjust the Luminance of individual color in a black and white photo. Here’s a gif of it working:

![](/assets/images/posts/1__Lo9JmeywsFOyQCQLAf3BPQ.gif)

## Adding Color and Tone

When I recently [asked on Twitter](https://twitter.com/usedarkroom/status/632291196463894529) about what you guys wanted to know about Black and White editing, color and tone were the two standout requests. It may sound weird to talk about color in a “Black and White Editing” post, but it’s actually very powerful to add color after fully desaturating the photo. By desaturating the photo, all the colors get flattened to a gray color, which means adding color back up adds the color evenly across the entire tone range. There are multiple ways of adding color to your photo. The easiest way is to use the Temperature slider to add a blue/yellow hue to the photo.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__wY48Y30SgKgWOpBtUg3pcg.jpeg)

Being constrained to global blue/yellow hue adjustments, while efficient, is very constraining. This is where the Tone Tool comes in.

## Tone Tool

Also new in Darkroom 2 is the new Tone tool (Part of the Pro Kit In-App Purchase). Now, you’re no longer constrained to just Blue/Yellow hues with the temperature slider. you can pick any color on the entire color spectrum, and a different color for the highlights and for the shadows. This is also known as Split Toning (splitting the tone between highlights and shadows). You don’t need to desaturate the image to make use of it, but the two work really well together. A very traditional split tone is using yellows for the highlights, and blue for the shadows.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__cc9y8ivesioERB__shorKcA.jpeg)

You can also use the same orange tone for both highlights and shadows for a sepia look, or you can add a pink hue to your shadows for a sunburnt look.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__oMc3mIWZb91ChEQBSB3OoA.jpeg)

To get the ultimate control over the color of your photos however, switch over to [the Curves Tool](/blog/2015-06-curves-part-1-of-2).

## Curves

For the ultimate control over the exact tone in your photo in various tones, Curves is your faithful servant. Again, almost all of the details described in the [two](/blog/2015-06-curves-part-1-of-2)\-[part](/blog/2015-07-curves-part-2-of-2) series on Using Curves applies here. The only real difference is that because the colors have been removed, and because the RGB curve can be used to quickly adjust the brightness and contrast, the adjustments in the various color curves become much more subtle since they’re affecting the tone in a very obvious way.

You can recreate the same split tone style using Curves, but doing so requires a lot more work. If you want to play around with it, try making the curve of each color channel shallower or steeper (but still a straight line), and play around with the angles to get the tone you want.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__YlGQFRQOzNvE5dtpeNCdYA.png)

![](/assets/images/posts/1__c5K__VOBkyTeFFYU8pTHNFA.jpeg)

## Addendum

We spent a lot of time thinking about whether Curves should come before or after Saturation. If Curves was applied before saturation, then by desaturating the photo, you end up with a grayscale photo regardless of what Curves was doing to the photo. On the other hand, you get the ability to really control how the Color-to-Grayscale conversion happens. If Curves comes after Saturation (As it does in Darkroom), then making adjustments to the Red, Green, and Blue curves will introduce tone to the photo. We ultimately decided that the ability to take advantage of Curves-Before-Saturation was too advanced to appeal to a wide segment of the Darkroom population, and that adding tone to a Black and White photo is common enough to win-out.

Sunday School #7: Black and White photos are a category of photos all on their own and can evoke very powerful emotional responses and elevate a photograph when done well.

Black and White Editing


_The sixth installment in our weekly series exploring mobile photography through the lens of Darkroom_

We’ve covered basic photography techniques, and started talking about how to use Darkroom’s Curves editor to fine-tune your photos. There’s a lot more to be said on each of those topics, and we’ll get to them, but first, I thought it would be helpful to stay high-level and cover our bases. This week, we’ll go over how to adopt a mobile photo editing workflow. Most of you probably already have a workflow, and hopefully this article will give you some insight into how you can optimize it.

## Why Workflows Matter

It used to be that a single roll of 35mm film got you 36 photos, you got them processed, then shared the ones you liked. If you used 120mm Medium-Format film, you had 12 photos. You really needed to think about what you were photographing and whether it was worth the cost and the space on the roll. That thought process did a lot of the filtering and pre-selection, and you ended up with photos on your roll that you felt compelled by.

With digital cameras, and particularly smartphone cameras, our camera rolls are packed with near-duplicate photos. You want to photograph your coffee? It may take 3–4 photographs to get the perspective right, then you might try 2 or 3 different compositions, and your camera roll now has 30 photos of a single, now cold, latte. Going on a hike? a birthday party? Shoot, now you have 200 photos to go through. Having to go through them all, find the ones you like, and start editing them could take the fun out of the process altogether. When you consider how much time and work is involved with editing each one… fuggedaboutit!

![](/assets/images/posts/1__2M3qLGqBR28fQ1__V4UQ7ng.png)

Central to Darkroom are two principles: Workflow efficiency and Creative Control. There are some apps that excel at creative control, and other that excel at workflow management. It was our principle that without full editing control, a workflow would not be efficient, and vice versa. Darkroom’s innovating “No-Import Editing” and lightweight no-commitment editing makes photo editing as fast as photo browsing.

So, with that said, let’s start talking about why a workflow is important and how to start adopting one.

## The Funnel Approach

There isn’t a single “correct” workflow, and different workflows optimize for different variables, with experimentation, find the one that works for you!

The approach we’ll be covering today mimics a funnel. The goal in the first part of the process is to go through all your photos, find the ones that you want to edit, then dig deep onto those photos.

If you’re particular about the photos you take when you’re in the camera, this workflow may not be ideal for you, but you’d also be a person of intense constraint. How do you not keep snapping?

Darkroom doesn’t have every photo editing feature. This was done on purpose, to focus the product and to ensure everything is done tastefully (Also, only 1 person working on a photo editor means time constraints :P). This workflow involves multiple apps.

## Step One: What Photo to Edit?

So you found a beautiful wall, your friend posed for you, and you took 12 photos waiting to get the right pose and lighting. The first step is to look through the photos you’ve taken, and figure out which is the one you want to share. Most people’s workflow starts with the Photos app for this reason. The Photos app is by far the fastest and most efficient for this specific task, but how do you get that photo into your workflow? The Photos app has some basic editing controls, but they’re designed for the lay-man who wants to do some basic quick adjustments, not a mobile photographer who’s trying to establish a personal style.

When we were doing some research in the early days of Darkroom, we heard a lot of horror stories from photographers who each had their own solutions to the problem. In one particularly extreme example, the photographer would go through their photos in the Photos app, find the one they want to edit, then rotate it, so when they open VSCOcam to edit, they can identify it and un-rotate it there. Another photographer would copy the photo in the Photos app then start their editing process in Snapseed where they can paste it.

The inefficiency here is pretty evident, and one of the core reasons why we started Darkroom. In Darkroom, all your photos are always there, no-import needed. Further more, getting in an out of a photo is as easy as a tap, and a swipe down. While you’re editing, you can swipe back and forth through your library.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__I0__bi0Kq__wewKEskI9tCxw.gif)

What makes Darkroom different than the Photos app however, is how much power it puts immediately under your finger. Part of the process of determining which photo to edit from a set of near-duplicate photos is some basic editing. Maybe cropping and rotating helps you determine if that one photo is salvagable. Maybe some brightness and contrast does the trick. Darkroom blurs the line between photo browsing and professional-grade photo editing in a way that helps you do this faster than you’ve ever been able to before.

**That’s why Darkroom makes sense as the first app in your workflow**

## Step Two: Structure, Color, and Light

Today, Darkroom specializes in a specific subset of photo editing: Light and Color. The first step when a photo is selected is to get the right rotation and crop. The order of the tools in Darkroom reflects this workflow. In Managing Composition, we talked about classic compositions in photography. If you’ve messed up, this is your chance to fix it. The various aspect ratios impact how the composition is perceived, and the pre-defined aspect ratios ensure you tell and accurate and consistent story.

Next, you try to land on a filter and get the look you want. There’s not much to say here, just tap on the filters until you find one you like or you’ve created. Once you land on a look, the color channel curves, temperature, and saturation are where you play next with color, getting the right tone and emotion. The filter is doing the heavy lifting here, but each photo is different, and your interpretation of the filter is unique to you. That’s what makes editable filters in Darkroom so powerful. The filter should fit your photo, not the other way around!

Finally, the Basic Adjustments Tool (The sliders) is where you play around with light. This involves a combination of Brightness, Contrast, and the RGB curve adjustments. The peculiarities and details involved probably deserve their own Darkroom Sunday School post. On a basic level, you can correct for exposure and contrast.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__EJjLs5Un4RrHvSqU5ZClPg.png)

Ok now you’ve got the right light and color in your photo. Great. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed the process. At this point, you have a choice to make. If the photos looks great, you can just share it directly from Darkroom. If it still needs work, you can save it to the Camera Roll and pick up in another app. What else is there to do, you ask?

## Step Three: Cleaning Up

One of my favorite apps is touchRetouch. It’s a spot-removal app that, once you get used to, you’ll always want to keep close by. It’s a fairly straightforward process to use it, though predictably tap-heavy.

The variety of situations where you’d want to remove spots is surprisingly common: Birds in the sky, trash on the street, rocks in the sand, a protruding light pole in your composition, a parked car, even a whole building sometimes!

When you know what your focal point is, and what story you want to tell, these unwanted elements could get in the way, and increase the amount of visual noise in your photos. By removing them, you end up with a clean photo that tells a stronger story.

To remove a spot, tap “Open photo from gallery”, select the photo you just exported from Darkroom, then select the “Highest” setting (See what I mean by tap-heavy?), and you’re in. There are only really three buttons that you need to know about: The brush, the eraser, and the start button (The triangle). Zoom in on the section that contains the spot, use the brush to draw around it, then hit “Start”, and watch it do its magic. You may need to undo, use the eraser to fix issues, and try again, but you can experiment and see where its boundaries are. When you’re done, the Floppy Disk icon is where you go to share.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__Ya3oiXBcHDWUR2u68sTm0g.png)

## Step Four: Perspective

A proper perspective can make the difference between a good and a great photo. If you’re sharing to Instagram, at this point you can go straight to Instagram and edit perspective in the “Adjust” tool of the upload process, but I prefer the control that SKRWT (I pronounce it as “Skroot” but, “Screw it” works too, I hear).

Again, the app is unnecessarily tap-heavy, but it gets the job done. Importing a photo to SKRWT is pretty simple, and the two main tools of import are vertical and horizontal perspective. The goal here is, if you have a right angle, make sure it’s actually a right angle. This involves a combination of vertical and horizontal perspective correction. Play around, practice makes perfect!

![](/assets/images/posts/1__HwUFEoAyTHEMnHXr3V2mxg.png)

## Step Five: Attention Whore

Share to Instagram and start counting likes. Most people won’t know how much work went into the photo, but they’ll appreciate and ogle, and _you’ll_ know. Oh, you’ll know, because the likes are flooding your inbox.

## Addendum

Ok so, it’s a lot of work. I know. Yes, those other apps aren’t great. Having three duplicates isn’t great. The suggested solutions to these problems seem like temporary hacks, which they are. Right now, today, this is what we have though. I am confident the future will be brighter though ;)

Sunday School #6: This week, we’ll go over how to adopt a mobile photo editing workflow, giving you some insight into how you can optimize it.

Adopting a Workflow


_This is the fifth installment in our weekly series exploring mobile photography and Darkroom._ [_Explore the rest here_](/blog/)_._

This is the second of two parts on Using Curves in Darkroom. [Last week](/blog/2015-06-curves-part-1-of-2), we talked about how Curves works, what it is capable of, and how you can use it as the workhorse and foundation of your post-processing. This week, we’ll focus more on the Red, Green, and Blue channels and talk about how you can use your knowledge to capture the perfect tone and that look you’ve been lusting after.

Just to review, a mental model to think about post processing is to imagine every pixel of your image as three buckets of red, green, and blue light. The unique combination of light in those buckets is what makes up the color of the pixel, and by filling and draining those buckets, you control what color the pixel is.

As we demonstrated in our previous post, Curves can be used to create brightness and contrast selectively in your photo. With access to the individual red, green, and blue channels, you also get the ability to adjust the color of the photo in its various tonal regions (A tonal region is all the pixels of the image that fall within a region of light). This transform is at the heart of post-processing.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__UWphwRsUwbW9oekSFWGdDA.jpeg)

## Tone

It’s impossible to cover every possible effect that is possible using Curves in this post, so we’re going to focus on a specific type of edit: Natural light response.

In this type of editing, your curves always have a smooth shape to them, and the Red, Green, and Blue channels all look fairly similar, but vary in subtle ways in different parts. For example, a filter might be more sensitive to red light in the shadows, and less so in the highlights, which gives a subtle two-tone cast to the image. Subtlety is key when editing with Curves, and that’s why Darkroom’s Curve editor is designed the way it is.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__67n2SQl0zSeWfn8jwU5yTA.png)

Editing in Darkroom typically starts with a filter, either one of the built-in filters, or one you’ve created yourself. It takes a lot of time to create curves from scratch whenever you want to edit a photo, and filters are how you streamline your process and make it much more efficient.

Once you find a filter you like, explore the different curves of the filter and look at how it influences your photo. Is one of the tones too strong? Try pulling it down. Shadows too dark? Pull them up.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__mTGTJJtfWmCsOrcQegAMCg.png)

It’s important to remember when you’re playing around with curves that the three color curves normally aren’t adjusted in isolation. In order to increase the contrast of the photo and give it a cast, all three color curves need to be adjusted to an “S-curve”, and the tone comes from the variation of the curve. For example, in our aforementioned example, if your shadows are too dark, you may need to pull the shadows up on all three colored curves, and how you adjust the values between them is the tone of that part of the image.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__JUizmm10g6AvAC72GaoiSA.png)

It takes some practice to understand how changes in the curves adjust your tone, and it takes some practice to develop an eye for tone and how to establish a style that you like. Practice makes perfect here!

## Fade

Faded looks became very popular with Instagram and later VSCO. Fade can add a lot of softness to your photo. Technically speaking, Fade is achieved by brightening up the blacks towards gray, and darkening the whites towards gray. In the process, crushing similar values together can simplify the amount of detail in your photo, and help focus the eye of the viewer towards a focal point in the photo.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__I2H____WINL__9aVcIvxw8BCA.png)

When adding a fade to your photo, you have two main variables you can control: The amount of the fade, and the strength of the fade. The amount determines how bright the blacks become, and how dark the whites become. The Strength determines how much of the neighboring shadows and highlights the fade picks up with it.

Here’s an example of a standard fade, applied step-by-step.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__x3mVG37__rUAegfzPuJOJhA.png)

Here’s an example of a very intense fade. Notice how the blacks are so much brighter, and the whites so much darker, and how it affects the rest of the photo.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__3JsoH2BEyyeyBE9iZ06WGg.png)

Here’s an example of a very strong fade. Notice how the gray that’s added to the photo includes a lot of shadows and highlights.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__NqxuGNyvtnuOqx6e__CBjtg.png)

As always, changing one colored curve more than another gives you the ability to add color to your fade. Here’s an example of a hard fade that adds different tones to the highlights and the shadows. Notice the different values for the curves.

## A Couple of Tips

Sometimes, when you’ve been editing the curves of a photo for a few minutes, you may find yourself with a weird effect on the photo, and you’re not sure which curve is introducing that effect. By long-pressing on the curve selector, you can individually turn off that curve, and keep every other effect in place, allowing you to narrow down the tools.

Also, as we mentioned repeatedly in this and the previous article, moving the curves together and relative to each other is very powerful. The percents at the bottom of the curve allow you to mimic one curve to another, and when editing, tapping above and below the curve moves the curve in small, 1% adjustments, allowing you to get very accurate results.

## Order of Precedence

Curves doesn’t work in isolation in Darkroom. There’s a pipeline of tools that get applied in order, and understanding the order is an important part of combining the tools for an interesting effect.

Generally speaking, the tools are in the order they are visually presented in. Top down within a tool, and left-to-right across tools. For example, if you’re adding a fade, you can combine it with some vignette and that darkens the outer parts of the images down into the tonal regions that are affected by the fade. Play around with the different tools together, see what you come up with!

## A Note on Digital Filters and Analog Film

For a century, photographers have used various brands of Film to give their photos a look, relying on the chemical mixture of the film and the development process to affect the colors and give photos certain looks. There was a lot of creativity afforded within the process that photographers built reputations, styles, and brands on top of.

When digital cameras replaced analog film cameras, all that creativity was lost, and digital post-processing mostly involved correcting for mistakes and basic adjustments. Photoshop was the tool to use, but because of its powerful and scope, it was very hard to use and learn. Lightroom came on to the scene, and distilled Photoshop down for photographers, and VSCO launched their very popular Lightroom presets for Lightroom which brought post-processing within the grasp of many more amateur photographers. Along the way, film-emulation became the aspiration of digital photographers trying to capture the nostalgia of classic photography and its looks.

Digital post-processing does not necessarily have to mimic old film stock, but it’s a great source of inspiration and practice.  
What makes one brand of Film different from another is how the chemicals in the film strip react to different amounts and colors of light. Curves is how you capture that effect. For example, certain film stock is much more sensitive to green light in low light than red and blue, which gives the photo a green cast in its shadows. Similarly, by pulling up the greens in the shadows, you can recreate the effect.

Sunday School #5: This week, we’ll focus more on the Red, Green, and Blue channels and talk about how you can use your knowledge to capture the perfect tone and that look you’ve been lusting after.

Using Curves (Part 2 of 2)


_This is the second installment of the weekly series exploring mobile photography and post processing. In_ [_last week’s post_](/blog/2015-06-exposure-control)_, we explored exposure, and how to properly control it. This week, we’ll talk about composition._

No amount of post-processing can turn a bad photo to a good photo. Editing a photo after taking it can bring out certain subjects, hide others, and give the photo a mood and an emotional dimensionality to it. Every beautifully edited photo you’ve seen started out as a beautiful photo, with care taken to identify a focal point, leading lines, and symmetry. These are the elements from which a photo forms its 1,000 words. A basic grasp of these elements and how they influence your photo can dramatically improve the quality and expressiveness of your photography.

## Focal Point

A photograph derives its power from its ability to tell a story visually. The story may be as simple as “look at this beautiful house” or complex enough to start a revolution. When you’re starting out, picking a singular focal point allows you to reduce the complexity of your photos.

In this context, “Focal point” refers not to the optical focus from your lens, but to an element in your photograph that stands out as the central, most important one. You have quite a few tools in your tool belt to identify and separate you focal point from the rest of your photograph: Color, size, pattern, and leading lines. We’ll talk about leading lines in the next section, but the others are simple enough to explain.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__eAikYBEOy3WwHOPb5zwQ3w.jpeg)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__YmZOMCTor__UjmzSs5telTQ.jpeg)

When it comes to using Color and Size to establish a focal point in your photo, what you’re going after is contrast. If you’re taking a photo in an urban environment on a drab day, a person’s yellow jacket really pops against the grayness that surrounds it. Same thing for size. If you’re taking an overhead photo of a crowd in a festival, a single person taller than everybody else becomes the focal point you can build your story around.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__U2d0auhnlaaIgS9OsbiZlw.jpeg)

Establishing patterns — and more importantly — breaking them, is another very powerful method of establishing a focal point. When the brain sees a pattern, it treats it as a single object, and the individual items making the pattern recede to the background. When you break that pattern, it pops out and stands on its own. Apartment complex facades, meadows with one tree turning color before the others, etc are all examples of using pattern to establish a focal point.

I want to stress that not every photo needs a focal point. For example, you can use perspective to establish a vanishing point, and your photo might use color and proportion to tell a story. But for photos that have them, focal points become the center of attention, upon which a story is built.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__mXs8S58K0F0tqdQQu6Dorw.jpeg)

## Leading Lines & Vanishing Points

One of the most impactful ways of reinforcing a focal point is using leading lines. Leading lines get their name because they lead the viewer’s eye towards a point or region in the photo and create flow in a photograph.

The classic example of a leading line is a tree log along a trail, the yellow dividing line on a road, or the tops of buildings on a city street. In a compositionally complex photo, leading lines can reduce the complexity, create a pattern, and give structure to your photo.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__cmWGwU6Mg5x2XEFILoBKsg.jpeg)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__kl3iVncM0utAqAHvdQ44PQ.jpeg)

When you combine a focal point with a leading line, you can dramatically empower that focal point and push the viewer’s eyes towards it, creating a much more dramatic effect.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__jMCDOw67l5mu9PtE__ZWeWA.jpeg)

Any discussion of leading lines naturally leads to talk about perspective and vanishing points. When you use the curb of a city sidewalk as a leading line, you inevitably end up with the curb of the opposite side of the street, as well as the roofs of the buildings and all the floors and balconies. If you are taking a photo along the street, you’ll notice that they all lead towards a single point: The vanishing point. If you stand diagonally across a building, you’ll be looking down two streets, and end up with two vanishing points.

Vanishing points are the terminals, the periods at the end of the sentence. Without them, your eyes are led down an incomplete path. What you put at the end of that road if up to you. Your central subject, perhaps?

![](/assets/images/posts/1__uy__39o3Sevz__pCiesmjcwA.jpeg)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__mqkGaXkrGmrHrYBFm4HMQw.jpeg)

## Rule of Thirds and Symmetry

Given that background and terminology, we can move forward to assembling these pieces together into a photograph. Let’s say you have your focal point, leading lines, or vanishing point. Where do you put them in your photo? Speaking very technically and prescriptively, there are two places to put these areas of focus, and choosing which depends on the story you want to tell.

The first is smack-dab in the middle. Center it, and create symmetry around it. You can center either vertically or horizontally or both. Centering along only one axis gives you the ability to use the other as a part of telling the story. For example. If you’re in New York City, walking to the center of the street and taking a photo down an avenue creates a beautiful vanishing point that you can horizontally center. However, the intersection itself is not interesting, and sliding your vanishing point down can really elongate all the buildings and get much more of them in, which improves the sense of space and proportion in the photo.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__zADPYbDMp8kOJkKnHNro__w.jpeg)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__C7wAgbJ1KI1h__TV2oM9__wA.jpeg)

Centering is a powerful tool for establishing focus, empowering your focal point, and giving it power.

The second rule of composition is known as the Rule of Thirds, and this one you likely have heard of. The basic idea is that by dividing your frame into three equal columns and three equal rows, you establish points that your focal point can sit on. If you’re taking a landscape, you horizon could be on the bottom third line. If you’re taking a photo of a person looking to the right, they should stand on the left third line. This, like most other rules in photography, is a sure-fire way of establishing a result. Straying off the advice is encouraged, but an understanding of what the elements at play are is helpful in avoiding frustration.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__Or1lxF3uV6KN1S1iL3jvYQ.jpeg)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__cp2Tg2G2GctgNp0fOl4gqA.jpeg)

To really understand when to center, when to use the rule of thirds, and when to stray from these rules, a discussion of context is important.

## Context

One of the most common mistakes we see photographers make is not providing enough context in their photos. Context allows the viewer to understand the focal point in its environment, how it interacts with it, and how it lives within it. For example. A photo of a beautiful car parked with a view is much less powerful when the view is cropped out of the frame or the car takes up too much space in the frame. A beautiful building or house without its lawn or porch and some sky and surrounding buildings feels too close. Often, taking a few steps back, letting more of the surroundings into the frame while keeping the focal point centered can really let the point sit in its natural space, instead of feeling detached and aggressively cropped.

For photo of people, a form of providing context is by allowing what they are looking at to be included in the frame. For example, if your model is looking left, putting them on the right side of the photo allows more of the environment to their left into the frame, allowing the viewer to see what the model is looking at. Try this: Make your friend stand and look left. Now take two photos, one with them on the left side and one with them on the right side. Which is more expressive? Unless you’re intentionally trying to create a sense of mystery or tension, you’ll find that positioning the model on the right when they’re looking left will create a much more compelling story.

When it comes to landscapes, how much sky you choose to include in your frame is a major factor in determining the mood of your photo. The more sky, the more airy and open the landscape. Also, in landscape photography, having a foreground and a background is essential for creating depth. Without a foreground, a landscape in the distance can appear washed out, flat and distant. With a foreground to provide contrast and distance, your landscape can really pop.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__MsbzKzA0qRZQtadxL124LQ.jpeg)
![](/assets/images/posts/1__OdVkqDWKAIt04E0Np0J6Sw.jpeg)

## Perspective

One last parting note on perspective. When lining up your photos, and particularly when centering your focal point, taking the time to properly line up your vertical and horizontal lines can make a world of difference. If you’re taking a photo of a door or the facade of a building, making sure that the right angles of the door remain right angles in your photo is extremely important. A little bit of careless perspective looks sloppy and lazy. You don’t have to worry too much about getting it absolutely right — There are a lot of photo editing applications that support perspective correction — but you should try to get it close.

As always, the first step is to remember to wipe your lens and make sure it’s not full of dust and skin-oils!

Sunday School #2: Every beautifully edited photo you’ve seen started out as a beautiful photo, with care taken to identify a focal point, leading lines, and symmetry.

Managing Composition


_This is the third installment of the weekly series exploring photography and post processing. In the previous lessons, we discussed_ [_Exposure_](/blog/2015-06-exposure-control) _and_ [_Composition_](/blog/2015-06-managing-composition)_._

By now, you should understand how to compose your photos, and how to properly expose them so that you don’t end up with clipped highlights or shadows. By learning how to see, read, and incorporate light into your photos, you’ll have all the technical fundamentals of photography covered.

Understanding where it comes from, how it affects your photo, and how to manipulate it to your advantage is what differentiates a casual photo from an intentional, beautiful photo. As always, we’ll begin with a slightly technical introduction to establish context and frame the topic, then we’ll delve into how to use it.

## Another Quasi-Technical Introduction to Light in Photography

Your camera’s sensor is a grid of tiny buckets of light. Light travels as a wave, and its wavelength determines its color. Thankfully, throngs of engineers have — and continue to — optimize sensors to extract the more correct color, more nuanced gradations of light, and to do it with better optics and performance so you don’t have to worry about it. Yet understanding what the variables that impact Light are and how they affect light is how you learn to control it to your benefit.

The details of how camera sensors differentiate color and light off of photos is a fascinating topic, and may eventually be one we tackle, but understanding that photography at the end of the day is taming the wild beast of Light will suffice.

Light gets emitted from a source, either the Sun, or a flashlight. For simplicity, let’s talk about a flashlight. The bulb emits light that is very concentrated, and diffuses (spreads apart) very quickly. As it hits a surfaces, it further diffuses as it travels in other directions. Light that is bounced off a surface is called **Bounced Light**.

The relationship that matters to you as a photographer is that dense light is very bright and harsh, and diffused, bounced light is spread out and soft. Neither is better than the other, but they have an extremely dramatic impact on the photo, how it looks, what story it tells, and what it draws attention to.

## Contrast

In common english, Contrast is defined as:

> **contrast**  
> noun |ˈkänˌtrast|  
> the state of being strikingly different from something else, typically something in juxtaposition or close association

In photography, it can be restated as the range of brightness between the light and dark areas of the photo. This isn’t a canonical description of contrast in photography, but it serves our purposes here.

If you take a photo on a foggy day, the fog adds an even, gray cast that pulls up the shadows and brings down the highlights, and you end up with a low-contrast photo. At noon on a clear and sunny day, the bright areas of your scene bounce a massive amount of light from the sun, and the shadows are completely hidden, bouncing almost no light, and you end up with a very high-contrast photo.

As I’ve always said, there isn’t a “Correct” contrast that you should aim for always since it’s so dependent on the story you want to tell and the style you’re going after. However, unless you intentionally want to avoid it, ensuring that the darkest points of your photo are near-black, and the brightest parts of your photo are near-white will give your photo the widest tonal range possible, without clipping.

Increasing the tonal range means everything in between the brightest point and the darkest point gets as much gradation as possible. This is important because when subtle differences in tone are squished in a small range, they become indistinguishable (like clouds in the sky). The bigger the range, the more differentiation is possible.

Apart from controlling when you shoot and in what conditions, one way you can ensure you’re capturing as much detail as possible is by using the trick we described at the end of our first post: Proper Exposure Control. Keep knocking exposure down until you make sure your whites are not being clipped (another concept described in that post), and you’ll ensure you’re capturing the range.

## Portraits

Portraits can be one of the most fulfilling subjects to photograph. People generally love having their photograph taken, and to provide people with a beautiful representation of themselves is itself a thrill for the photographer.

The human eye is incredible sensitive to subtleties of the face. It’s what allows us to tell each other apart from slight changes in the facial shape and structure. In portrait photography, light is how you sculpt the face. Light is what distinguishes the nose from the cheeks, the forehead’s wrinkles from the eyebrows.

A portrait at noon on a hike is not a very please portrait. For one, the light source is directly above, which casts the shadows of the eyebrows down on the eyes. The nose also casts its shadow down on the mouth, elongating it, and the skin oils on the face shine in the sun’s light.

In a traditional portrait, the light typically shines at 45˚ from the side, primarily lighting one side of the face, and the reflected light illuminating the other. Shooting outside, this typically means you’ll have to get your shots within an hour of sunset, or an hour within sunrise. Indoor, you have more options. Let’s dig into both.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__wZCC4__m4HblJqF8ctT42Pg.jpeg)

## Golden Hour

You might’ve heard this term thrown around between your photographer friends. The Golden Hour is actually two hours: The hour after sunrise, and the hour after sunset. During those times, due to the angle of the sun to the photographer’s location on Earth, less light makes it through which softens it, and the light spends much more time in the atmosphere, which absorbs more blue light than normal and yellow/golden light is left.

Use Google to find out when the Sunrise and the Sunset are in your area, and seek it out. Look for a high place with a long view. The longer the view, the more extreme the effect. Ideally, clouds in the sky will capture the light before the Sun actually rises, and the intensity of the color is at its highest.

Portraits and landscapes at these hours are incredible displays of light. Mountains cast shadows, people cast long shadows, and portraits are especially beautiful. Play around with the light, try pointing the camera directly towards the sun.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__oj5hQ51y2FxHE5FmkaRGFQ.jpeg)

## Bounced Light

Light, as we said, bounces off reflective surfaces. The more it bounces, the more it’s diffused, and the softer it is. For example, in an urban environment, two people in a coffeeshop with a window to their left will have the sun reflected off the buildings and the environment around, and through the window, casting a soft light to the environment. The softness of the light allows you to bring up the shadows without clipping the whites, increasing the range of what the sensor can capture.

Look for large windows in open indoor spaces, wait for the sun’s light to get bounced in, rather than shine directly in, and try taking portraits sideways to the window. You’ll be amazed how good soft, bounced light can make a portrait.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__Orr1TWn1BELuVcBS5SvyGQ.jpeg)

## Harsh Light

On a closing note, I wanted to talk about harsh light. This is in contrast (hah!) to what I’ve been talking about for a few sections, but I thought it was important to reiterate there isn’t “one true way” or “correct” way to photograph and use light.

Harsh light is distinguished from soft light in two aspects: Its intensity, and how diffused it is. Like we said earlier, light diffuses quickly. If you bring your subject closer to the source of the light, more of it is closer together, and you have harsh light. You can simulate this by passing light through a small opening: A crack in the ceiling, a small window, a flashlight. You can use harsh light to add drama to your scene, and you when you combine it with underexposure, you can really focus the viewers attention to a single subject. Browse around Instagram on the [#chasingharshlight](http://instagram.com/explore/tags/chasingharshlight) for some inspiration.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__kTtm8OE__0__U0yYUP5EZOCg.jpeg)

As always, have fun with it!

Sunday School #3: learn how to see, read, and incorporate light into your photos, you’ll have all the technical fundamentals of photography covered…