Magic Select Masks in Darkroom

Hot on the heels of our recent iPhone Duo update, we’re thrilled to share Magic Select, a new Darkroom+ mask type which allows you to select anything within a photo.

Think of it as a really smart mask brush. To mask a specific thing in a photo, you’d reach for a brush to painstakingly paint along an edge, which gets tedious fast. Magic Select understands your photo and intention, so a tap or a quick stroke selects what you'd expect and what you'd want to edit. Brushing has its place for edits like dodging and burning. Linear and Radial masks cover a lot of that today, and we’re looking at adding a brush for when you need it.

Taken together with the suite of fixes, performance and stability improvements we just launched, photo editing in Darkroom has never been this magical before.

Please note that Magic Select masks are only available on iOS 27 and devices running Apple’s GPU Family version 7. List of supported devices.

Making a Selection

Magic Select sees your photo the way you do: a person, the sky behind them, the street they’re standing on. Tap the person to brighten them against a busy background, darken a sky that pulls the eye away, or lift the shadows on a face without touching anything else. Small changes like these decide where someone looks first.

It runs on Apple’s built-in segmentation model, right on your device. Your photos aren’t uploaded anywhere, and the analysis is quick.

There are three ways to select with Magic Select Masks:

Tap to select an object

The simplest mode to select is simply to tap within a clear object, like a person or a pumpkin. This covers scenarios in which the object is distinct and significant in the photo.

Draw to select a region

In more complex scenarios, where a tap is ambiguous, brushing to select a series of points in your photo gives better results, as it indicates intent to select a shape that spans multiple areas.

Box select

Finally, a long-press and then drag on the photo enables marquee selection, which is a quick shortcut to cover a larger area of the photo, rather than brushing back and forth repeatedly.

Add, erase, undo, and redo

Every selection adds to your mask, so you can tap a pumpkin, then the person holding it, then draw across the field they are standing in. If you pick up too much, switch to the eraser and select the part you want to remove. Undo and redo sit right in the tool, so you can try a selection and step back without starting over.

Edge Refinement Tools

Most of the time, the automatic selection delivers a high-quality mask you can start adjusting right away. Sometimes, however, a little bit of edge refinement helps smooth edges and reduce haloing in the photo after making adjustments. In that case, the “...” Mask Options menu contains a new “Show Edge Tools” option.

Edge Fit

Edge Fit uses the detail in your photo to pull the mask edge onto the real edges near it. It’s most useful for subjects with fine detail, like hair, fur or leaves, where the automatic selection can look a little blocky. Edge Fit only works near the edge of the mask, so the parts of your selection that are already right stay as they are.

Shift Edge

Shift Edge moves the whole edge of the mask in or out. If a thin outline of the background shows around your mask, drag the slider to the left to pull the edge in. If the mask cuts off part of your subject, drag it to the right to push the edge out. The slider changes slowly near the middle, so small moves give you fine control.

Feather

Feather softens the mask edge so your adjustment fades in gradually instead of stopping at a hard line. This helps your edits blend into the rest of the scene, especially when you make a large change to exposure or color. A little goes a long way: a small amount of Feather is usually enough to hide a visible seam.

These new edge refinement tools aren’t limited to Magic Select! They work on every pixel-based mask in Darkroom: Subject, Foreground, and Background, and the Smart Masks from Portrait and ProRAW photos, like Sky, Hair, Skin, Glasses, and Teeth. A Hair mask with a slightly blocky edge, or a Subject mask with a faint halo, can now be cleaned up the same way.

We’ve been having a lot of fun internally playing around with Magic Select, discovering ways to integrate it into our editing workflow, and we think this way of editing really highlights the difference between Darkroom and more entry-level consumer photo editing applications. Photography is the art of storytelling using light, and masking is how you paint the light in your photo. It’s how photographers have been doing it since the invention of photography in the darkroom.

We are really excited for the creative expression Magic Select Masks will unlock for everybody, and can't wait to see what amazing imaginative results come from it.

Magic Select and the edge tools are the new pieces. This release also includes a long set of improvements and fixes for the masks you already use: Linear and Radial masks respond faster while you move them, Depth and Range masks select more consistently, and saved masks reopen more reliably. The full list is in the Darkroom 7.6 release notes.

Thank you, as always, for your continued support and enthusiasm.

The Darkroom Team

Frequently Asked Questions