There are thousands of photo editing apps on the App Store today. We’ve seen plenty of camera apps that offer editing capabilities — some who simplify things for the user while others who give extra features with granular details. I’ve tried a number of apps in the past and lately, Darkroom is one of the two favorite photo editors on my iPhone for any kind of photo edits.
Darkroom is an absolutely fantastic & powerful photo editor, currently only available on the iPhone, which is a shame since I’d have really liked to use the screen real estate on iPad. It lets you edit your photos using a bunch of different toolsets and filters (of course). My favorite thing about Darkroom is its ability to make edits to your photos directly in the Camera Roll or other albums in your Photo Library, without the need to specifically import them into the app. There’s also a nifty “Hide Screenshots” setting in the app, so you are presented with only the photos that exist in your Camera Roll. Once you pick a photo to edit, all the tools are available at the bottom of the photo. Darkroom offers tools such as Crop & Straighten, Filters, Sliders for Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Temperature, Fade, Vignette & Sharpness and an (infinite) Undo button that remembers all the edits you’ve made and jump back to a specific one. You can choose from 12 filters that ship with the app, or create your own custom filter and use it to edit any photo. Quite possibly the best thing about Darkroom is its ability to edit photos using Curves. You have the option to controls curves for RGB values, which is insanely good.
Once you’re done editing a photo, you can save it to the Camera Roll or export it to Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. There’s a nifty option to export the photo as a Square photo, which is useful if you want to post it to Instagram.
Darkroom is available Free on the App Store, with an $2.99 IAP to unlock the “Curves” feature.