
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


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


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


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


**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


_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…

Hunting Light


_The first in a series of tutorials on mobile photography._

Working on a photo editor for a year means we spend a lot of time staring at pixels and manipulating them. One common pitfall we see photographers falling into repeatedly is proper exposure. The question of proper exposure is well-documented, but hasn’t been adapted to mobile photography before.

We’ll attempt to describe what’s happening on a technical level first, then we’ll dive into how you control it on your iPhone, then dive into some recommendations to make sure you capture the best photo possible, always.

## A Quasi-Technical Description of Exposure and Clipping

Before we start, a little bit of terminology is helpful to establish context. Exposure refers to the amount of light that hits the sensor of your camera. Proper Exposure means the bright and the dark areas of the photo both got enough light to distinguish detail. Overexposure means the bright areas in the photo got too much light, and underexposure means the dark areas got too little.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__xJgHFPNs1UdG3mR7iUC5pg.png)

The problem with over and under exposing is that you risk “clipping” your whites or blacks. When they’re clipped, you lose detail; Your sky no longer contains clouds, but is bleached white. To understand what Clipping means and why it happens, you need to have a basic understanding of how your camera sees the world.

This is a simplified analogy of how the sensor works, helpful to establish a mental model. On a modern digital camera sensor, each pixel is represented by three colors: Red, Green, and Blue. Each can be thought of as a bucket. Once your camera is finished filling the buckets, it reads the amount of light in each, and that’s your pixel. Clearly, each bucket has a maximum amount of light it can hold, and once it’s full, it can’t fill up any more. If all three red, green, and blue buckets fill up while the shutter is open, you end up with indistinguishable white, and all the detail in that part of the photo is lost forever. Similarly, if not enough light gets into the buckets, you end up with near-black.

Your camera is really smart and takes care of all of this for you, so you never have to think about it. However, in most photos, you have to make a trade-off between capturing detail in your shadows, and capturing detail in your highlights. It’s a tough decision to make, because you ideally want to capture the full scene, but during most of the day, the brights are very bright, and the shadows can be very dark. If you’ve heard the term “Golden Hour” before or wondered why a lot of photographers post photos of the sunrise and sunset, one of the reasons is because during those times, the sun gets much softer, making the difference between highlights and shadows less stark.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__tgMVvgKlyXcG4EVbpmWMmQ.jpeg)

## Controlling Exposure on your iPhone

Ok, so with that background, let’s start talking iPhone. The first step to taking a good photo on an iPhone is to wipe your lens. Make sure you don’t have a blanket of dust on it from your pocket, and make sure you don’t have a lot of skin-oil on it causing streaks of light. Wipe it quickly on your shirt or pants, and make sure it’s sparkling clean. This’ll make sure lights in the evening aren’t streaky and your photos don’t look like they’re shot through foggy eyeglasses.

Once you’re in the camera app, iOS takes over exposure for you. It analyzes the stream from the sensor, and if it finds really bright areas (the sky, a white house, or a laptop screen), it automatically adjusts the exposure down, and alternatively, will up the exposure if it finds a lot of really dark areas.

When composing a photograph, you need to have some point of focus: An area in the photo that you want to guide the viewer’s eye towards. That’s the most important part of the photo, and you want to make sure that point is properly exposed and focused. When you tap to focus on that point, you’re also indicating to iOS that you want that area exposed.

What happens if that point is dark? iOS will up the exposure, and your sky might get blown out (become indistinguishably white) in the process. You’ll notice, when you tapped to focus, that a little sun icon showed up next to the focus square. If At this point, you swipe up and down, you’ll control exposure. Up will increase the exposure, and down will decrease it.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__DGi2fJWxC8s0OV__YEXG0__w.png)

You can play around with this slider, sliding it up to get a better sense of what white clipping is, and sliding down for the opposite. When you move your phone however, or when iOS thinks the object you focused on is outdated, it’ll take over again and try to fix the exposure for you. If you don’t want that to happen, long-press on the point you want to focus, until a yellow pill shows up at the top letting you know that AE/AF Lock is on. AF means Auto-Focus, and AE means Auto-Exposure. You’ve essentially taken over and told iOS that you know what you’re doing.

At this point, you get to make your artistic decision. Are you taking a silhouette of a person against the sky? You’ll want to underexpose aggressively to completely black out the person. Are you taking an indoor shot? You’ll want to properly expose the wood and the walls, and the windows can be blown out, it doesn’t matter. How you make your decision here takes us to our final point –

## Is it better to overexpose a photo or underexpose a photo?

The answer, frustrating as it may be, is that it depends. Unless intentionally used for effect, once a region of the photo is clipped, it’s lost forever. iOS doesn’t know whether you want to post-process your photo or not, so it tries to get you a photo you can use as-is. However, if you use a tool like Darkroom, you can get the best of both worlds with some work.

When you tap on an area and lock AE/AF, you can underexpose slightly to make sure the highlights are not clipped, then you can use Curves in Darkroom to counteract the underexposure by pulling up the shadows and midtones. That way, your highlights are maintained, and your point of focus remains properly exposed. You’ll be surprised how much you can boost the exposure of a region of your photo in Darkroom without ruining it.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__xPP5rtbv__inV6ZYACN44Dw.png)

My personal rule of thumb is: Unless used for effect or style, never clip whites, and worry about it later in Darkroom. It’s easy to clip whites in Darkroom, it’s impossible to unclip them. In my testing, clipping shadows, while easy and prevalent, is much harder than clipping highlights. Getting absolutely no light into your red green and blue buckets is actually really hard, so you always have at least some color that you can bring out. That’s why I err on not overexposing, rather than worry too much about underexposure.

As always, you need to experiment, see what works for you, and adapt as your style and subjects change. I hope this post has given you another tool in your tool belt so the next time you go to take a photo, you can take the perfect photo. It’s quite incredible what these tiny cameras are capable of today.

Sunday School #1: Exposure refers to the amount of light that hits the sensor of your camera. Proper Exposure means the bright and the dark areas of the photo both got enough light to distinguish detail.

Proper Exposure Control


_This is the fourth installment in our weekly series exploring mobile photography and Darkroom. The_ [_first_](/blog/2015-06-exposure-control) [_three_](/blog/2015-06-exposure-control) [_lessons_](/blog/2015-06-hunting-light) _covers basic photography techniques._

So far, all our lessons have focused on the fundamentals of photography. That was an intentional choice to reinforce the idea that post-processing does not make a bad photo good; It merely helps it tell its story better.

Now that we understand [how light affects our photos](/blog/2015-06-hunting-light), [how to properly compose](/blog/2015-06-managing-composition) them to tell the right story, and [how to expose them](/blog/2015-06-exposure-control) so they have a wide expressive range, it’s time to switch gears and start talking editing.

This part of the series involves Darkroom, and we’re starting it with an in-depth look at Curves (In-App Purchase). To celebrate, we’re having a **30% off sale** to wet your feet with it and start playing around if you haven’t already.

## A Brief Historical Tangent

The story of Curves goes back to the earliest days of Darkroom. I grew to love what certain filters on VSCO where doing to my photo, but they weren’t perfect, and my process involved multiple apps and compromises to get the look I wanted. I decided to build an app to automate that process. After a few failed attempts at figuring out what was giving the filter its unique qualities, I stumbled on tone curves, began experimenting with them in Lightroom, and was awe-struck at the power and expressiveness of those lines.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__9__BvQjOJVyIvNBRgZcA4iA.png)

After building a traditional point-based curve editor as a prototype, I realized how hard it was to use on a small device, and spent a good long time designing various interactions until we landed on the curve editor we shipped with Darkroom.

Curves is such a powerful and central tool, that you can actually recreate many of the popular filters on iOS just using that tool. You can fix exposure issues, capture unique styles, create fades of any tone, and establish mood.

With so much power and flexibility, it goes without saying that an understanding of what Curves is as a tool, how it works, and how to use it goes a long way towards being able to use it effectively. There’s a lot to cover, so we split it into two parts. This is part one.

## How Curves Work

As we mentioned back in [Proper Exposure Control](/blog/2015-06-exposure-control), a model for thinking about how your camera’s sensor sees light is buckets. Each pixel of your photo is comprised of three buckets: One for red, one for green, and one for blue. As long as your shutter is open and light is hitting your sensors, the buckets are filling up accordingly.

Photo Editing is the process of manipulating the amount of light in those buckets. You can artificially top off the blue bucket to give your photo a blue cast, or artificially drain the blue buckets in your photo to give the photo a yellow case (reducing blue means you end up with more red and green, which combine to produce yellow). Understanding this relationship provides you with a model to think about photo editing.

Simply adding and removing light across your entire photo doesn’t get you very far though. You’re constrained to giving your photo a hue-cast. Different tools give you different cuts and different ways of manipulating the buckets to create filters, fix white balance, and create emotion. Curves is one such tool.

Curves takes the photo, and divides it into different tonal regions. Tone in this context refers to the amount of light. So, “Blacks” have no light, “Shadows” have a little, and so on until “Whites” have so much light it becomes indistinguishable from white. Within each tonal range, you can add more light to each of the red, green and blue buckets, or drain the buckets. In Darkroom, by swiping up within a given tone range, you are telling Darkroom to find all the pixels in the photo that fall within that tone range, and pump more red into the red bucket of that pixel. If your swipe down, Darkroom drains red from the red bucket. There’s a channel selector (RGB/Red/Green/Blue are called color channels) that lets you decide which bucket you want to add/drain color from.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__CSVq1kCFu4u2UqNKhlhgvA.png)

The RGB channel is a special one, because it affects all three buckets simultaneously. Part 1 of the two part series will focus on the RGB curve, and explain how it can be used to edit brightness and contrast.

## RGB Curves

Apart from how much easier to use, refined, and accurate Darkroom’s curve editor is, the RGB curve is where Darkroom’s Curve editor really shines and stands apart from the other curve editors available on iOS.

As we mentioned, the red, green, and blue curves allow you to add and remove those respective colors from their buckets. With RGB, however, the interpretation of how to combine the influence on the three buckets is part of the secret sauce.

You’ll notice, in Darkroom, that by pulling the region up to 100%, it goes to white, and if you pull it down to 0%, it goes to black. This gives you the ability to “crush” your shadows and “wash out” you highlights, which can be particularly useful for silhouettes and putting the focus on other aspects of the image.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__vdaZ488VlpuDdnqriOOadw.png)

Given that understanding, the RGB curve can be described as the curve that determines the amount of light in your photo.

## Selective Brightness

Brightness is also defined as the amount of light in your photo.

“Wait. Are you telling me I just paid $2.99 for a slower, more complicated way of doing brightness, which is available for free???”

My first response, which I would likely keep to myself, is the $3 is about the cost of a bad latte at Starbucks.

My second, more constructive response, however, is that by allowing you to control the amount of light **per tone region**, Curves allows you to selectively brighten parts of your photo, while keeping others as they are.

Let’s say you took a photo of a landscape or a bright car that included a dark ground. If you increase the brightness, your clouds could easily be lose all the details from the highlights ¡No Bueno!

![](/assets/images/posts/1__64FI4bwr7U5myYD56v44kA.png)

By pulling up only the shadows and mid-tones, you can brighten up your shadows, while keeping your highlights as they are. In Lightroom, you might recognize this as the “Shadows” slider. That’s right, the RGB curve in Darkroom is in many ways equivalent to the Blacks, Shadows, Highlights, and Whites sliders in Lightroom.

Brightness visually looks like a bow. Either a bow up, or a bow down. A bow up will increase the brightness of the photo, and a bow down will decrease the brightness. How much you bow the curve up or down is up to you, but remember that clipping occurs when you overexpose and underexpose, and the curve lets you know but flatting at the top and bottom. Unless you explicitly are trying to, make sure a dark region is not more bright than a bright region (which creates and inverted look), and make sure you’re not clipped!

![](/assets/images/posts/1__NtLNrj5NsUewRCfuyHr5__Q.png)

## Selective Contrast

Contrast, much like brightness, adjusts the amount of light in a photo. However, unlike brightness which is the amount of light across the photo, contrast can be defined as “the distance from grey”. Visually, this means contrast looks like an “S-Curve”. High contrast means the highlights are brighter, and the shadows are darker, and low contrast means the highlights are darker and the shadows and brighter.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__jUv__twnwA38giIKhx3BplQ.png)

Another way I like to describe and think about contrast, is in terms of “stretch” in the curve. In this context, stretch is vertical stretch. If you brighten the highlights and darken the shadows, you’re “stretching” the curve, and when you do the opposite, you’re “compressing” the curve. If you want to selectively apply contrast to your photo, you can stretch certain parts of the curve or compress them.

![](/assets/images/posts/1__kOUYV9GKKgLVhuWbx8GW8A.png)

Some restraint is called for however. Curves is a tool of subtlety. Stretching too much can introduce artifacts to your photos, and compressing too much can make parts of your photo indistinguishable. Use judiciously!

Sunday School #4: This part of the series involves Darkroom, and we’re starting it with an in-depth look at Curves (In-App Purchase).

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