Curves, Unconstrained. White Balance, Remastered. And more...
Today we’re introducing a packed update to Darkroom with four major changes that improve the workflow, design, and range of our tools. First, the highlights:
- We’re bringing our Liquid Glass design UI refresh from the iPhone onto the Mac and iPad, ensuring Darkroom fits right in with iOS 27 and macOS 27 Golden Gate.
- We rebuilt our White Balance tools to make them more accurate and useful, including a neutral color picker and automatic white balance correction.
- For the first time since Darkroom v1.0, we’re updating the Curves tool with unconstrained editing and 5 new HSL Curves (Hue, Saturation, and Luminance).
- When previewing photos on iPhone you now get a photo strip that includes our flag and reject workflow features, making culling much more accessible, comparing photos photos faster, and navigating the library much easier.
Naturally, everything gets the spit ’n’ polish you’ve come to expect from Darkroom, so let’s get into it and go over the details.
The new Curves tool
The Curves tool holds a special place in our hearts because it was the first tool we built for Darkroom in 2014. This is the first time it’s gotten a real upgrade, and frankly it's needed one for a while, but we’re very happy with where we landed.
Why did it need an update?
The biggest challenge with building the Curves tool for the iPhone was making it touch-friendly. To make the Curves tool usable, we limited its motion to 5 handles that can only move vertically. This simplified the interaction model, making it easier to use for beginners, at the cost of creative restrictions.
Beyond the interaction model, the existing curve tool had other limitations. Certain advanced edits required tools that simply didn’t exist in Darkroom, for example: Make the shadows less saturated, make the unsaturated colors more colorful.
The new Curves tool enables all of this while sticking to our touch-friendly DNA.
New Curve Interactions
The new tool looks very much like the old one. However, a few changes have given us the ability to optimize it both for beginners who need some hand-holding and power users who want more creative freedom:
- By default, handles still move vertically along a track, but you can now drag horizontally to snap them off the track and move them freely.
- If a handle has not been changed from its default position, it will float with the curve and not contribute to shaping it unless you move it yourself.
- The two endpoints are always fixed, and if you move them horizontally off their track, they clip the information before and after, which is useful moving the black and white points. Moving them inwards still creates a faded vintage effect.
This means that for most users, the default finger-friendly behavior is maintained, and more advanced users get the creative freedom they were lacking in Darkroom.
Finally, the surrounding curves interface also got an update. Bringing expandable and collapsible panels for each curve on Mac and iPad, using the available vertical space more effectively. And a new scrollable channel picker on iPhone. Additionally, each Curve in the tool gets its own histogram, which represents the x-axis, to help visualize which regions are present in the image.
New HSL Curve channels
Photographers who are adventurous enough to venture into the world of video color grading may have stumbled on “HSL Curves” (Hue, Saturation, and Luminance). These tools, native to video workflows for decades, have been absent from photo-focused workflows (until now!). This update introduces 5 new curves. We’ll describe them in order.
Saturation vs Saturation Curve
This curve has saturation on both the x-axis and the y-axis. You can use it to desaturate highly saturated colors or increase the vibrancy of desaturated colors. Without this tool, saturation adjustments were global or color-specific. It’s very useful when making presets that are intended for bright and colorful scenes or more somber ones, where highly saturated colors might feel out of place.
Hue Curves
These three Hue curves allow you to adjust the hue, saturation, or luminance of different colors in your photo. That makes them quite similar to the Selective Color tool. In fact, the default tracks map to the same 8 color channels you see in that tool!
The difference lies in the range and customizability of the curve. You’re no longer constrained to our own definition of “blue” or “green”, and you can make adjustments easily across multiple channels, with much greater range.
For example, you can drag green colors all the way to red for an infrared film look.
Luminance vs Saturation Curve
Finally, the Luminance vs Saturation curve has Luminance on the x-axis and saturation on the y-axis. It allows you to control the saturation of the photo based on how dark or bright a color is. So you could desaturate bright regions of the image and increase saturation in the shadows.
While these tools are undoubtedly advanced and specific in their use, they’re indispensable for Preset makers who need different ways of selecting and shifting colors in a photo to create gorgeous, varied effects.
The New White Balance Tool
First, let’s discuss how you use these tools; then we’ll describe how they differ from the previous implementation.
How do I use the new tools?
For the most part, your iPhone camera is quite adept at managing white balance controls on its own. However, in certain circumstances, the shooting conditions might throw a cast on your photo. In that case, tapping on “Auto” will just remove that color cast.
For example, if you take a photo from behind the windshield (safely, when pulled over!) or through an airplane window, you’ll likely have a green tint to the whole image. Similarly, if you are capturing a scene in a forest with lots of natural green, the camera might try to correct for that and you end up with a magenta cast. Then you’ll need to use these tools to make the photo look natural.
Alternatively, if you’re wearing a white T-shirt, you want to ensure that shirt isn’t slightly yellow or blue, so you can tap on the color picker and drag it onto your shirt, and the algorithm will correct for any casts on that photo.
This is a really critical adjustment and key to ensuring photos look natural and well-balanced.
What changed, at a glance?
Darkroom’s previous temperature and tint sliders suffered from three limitations which have been addressed in this update:
First, they had a limited range, so it was easy to hit the edge of the slider before you fixed your white point. They also added color to white pixels, casting a color over the brightest parts of the photo rather than preserving the white point. Finally, without a color picker or an automatic mode, you were left to your own devices to figure out how to use them.
Now, the range of temperature and tint correction is greatly expanded, and the implementation is optimized for both RAW and processed images to take advantage of the extra fidelity. We even read the Kelvin temperature stored at capture time for RAW images, and use it as the starting point for the temperature slider.
The neutral color picker allows you to pick a point that should be gray and will adjust the two sliders to correct the color cast. Auto analyzes the image and picks an adjustment that reduces color casts in your photos.
Liquid Glass on iPadOS and macOS
In the 7.3 update we released recently, we gave the iPhone app a fresh coat of paint to bring it up to the modern design standards and aesthetics introduced by iOS 26 and later refined in iOS 27. Today we're bringing that same design language to the iPad and Mac, giving them a much-needed visual refresh, making them feel more immersive, less heavy, and more modern.
The changes in the UI are everywhere from the toolbars to the backgrounds to the sidebar and the sliders. Our priority with this work, as always, is to keep the photo front and center and ensure the app’s chrome fades to the background, which coincidentally aligns quite naturally with the design philosophy of Liquid Glass.
The new Photo Strip & Review Actions
Last, but if you’re anything like me, definitely not least, is the addition of the photo strip to the iPhone in portrait mode. This will feel quite familiar to you because it’s similar to the pattern first introduced in the Photos app.
While preview a photo, which is optimized for quickly previewing photos when the toolspace is collapsed and is used for identifying which photo you want to edit, you can now drag the strip horizontally to navigate through, and more easily compare, your photos. Most noticeably, this change gave us the space to move the Flag and Reject actions out of the hidden bar behind the tool to make them more prominent, and much easier to use.
Taken together, all these changes contribute to freshening up the experience of using Darkroom and enriching it, catching up where we’ve been behind, and pushing further where we can, always keeping that Darkroom magic of usability, friendliness, performance, and creative expression.
We are working hard on a ton of performance and infrastructure investments and more new features, and are looking forward to sharing them with you in the coming months.
Thank you for your continued support,
The Darkroom Team
