Today we’re excited to launch Darkroom: A powerful, efficient photo editor for mobile photographers. It’s available for free on the iOS App Store.

Why another photo editor?

Last summer, Matt (@brownthings) and I (@m) met over coffee to talk about a prototype I had been building and our experiences as mobile photographers. We were both frustrated by our lack of control over the editing process, and the amount of work involved. We knew we could do better.

For starters, filters didn’t always fit our images. They might capture the right tone in the shadows but not the highlights; adjustments were either hard or impossible. As a result, we ended up picking from a limited set of looks that lead us to filter fatigue. We wanted a way to define the precise tone and effect on our images.

Our insight was that mobile filters were developed using desktop tools. What if the same tools existed on a mobile app?

Darkroom is our answer. By putting the tools used to make filters in an app, we’ve turned static filters to jumping off points for editing. For the first time, you can capture the perfect tone, and you can create your own filters. The editing tools we offer are carefully chosen and powerful. Everything about Darkroom is designed to be fast and get out of your way.

In distilling photo editing to its essentials, we’ve built the fastest, most powerful photo editing app on iOS. Along the way, we’ve eliminated the import flow, added infinite history, and built a foundation for the future.

What makes Darkroom different?

Skip the import

One of Darkroom’s best features is something you don’t see — speed. We scrapped the slow, multi-tap import process, so all your photos are ready to edit right away.

Make your own filters

Edit existing filters and make them fit your style. Capture that beautiful edit in a custom filter and quickly apply it in the future.

Capture the perfect tone with Curves

Darkroom is built around powerful editing tools like Curves that gives you raw access to RGB channels.

Never worry about experimenting

With infinite history, every edit is always saved. Recall back to any time in your edits, or reset all the way to the beginning.

Last but not least, have fun with it!

Get Darkroom

To try out Darkroom, head over to the App Store. It’s is free to download, and Curves costs just $2.99. You can also learn more at usedarkroom.com.

Follow us on @usedarkroom on Twitter and @usedarkroom on Instagram. Hashtag is #darkroomapp.

We can’t wait to hear what you think of the app. We’ll be writing more about how we built Darkroom and what we’ve got planned in the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

The Darkroom Team

We just released our first upgrade to Darkroom, and it’s packed with lots of improvements, performance tweaks and bug fixes — most of them based on your helpful feedback (thank you!).

Here’s a rundown of what’s new:

Image zoom

Our #1 most requested feature! Now you can double tap or pinch an image to quickly zoom in and out.

Free Crop

When you’re cropping an image, tap “Free” to custom crop it any way you like. We’ve also added support for 16:9 ratio presets.

A how-to guide to Curves Our Curves tool gives you all the power of Darkroom, and if you haven’t picked it up yet, you should (it’s just $1.99 this week). Check out this super short video to see how it works.

Improvements and fixes

Finally, we’ve added a bunch of refinements to make Darkroom smoother and faster:

• Double-Tapping on the slider labels in the Basic Adjustments tool now resets the slider to zero.
• Long-Pressing the labels in Basic Adjustments tool will turn off only those edits helping you debug your edits.
• Long-Pressing the RGB/R/G/B labels in Curves (while they’re selected) will turn off only those edits helping you see your changes.
• The active region indicator in the Curve editor now highlights on touch-down, not pan start.
• Made the Create Filter button easier to tap.
• Improved the performance of opening and closing images.
• Fixed bug causing portrait photos to be blurry when being edited.
• Fixed downscaling when sharing images to Twitter.
• Darkroom properly lists Albums and Events synced from iPhoto on OS X!
• Brightness and Contrast are now standard properties and included in filters.
• Fixed bug causing history operations to overwrite each other when selecting them.
• Fixed flashing in the filter strip.
• Fixed animation when turning “Save as Square Photo” off.
• Improved some of the animations and gestures when navigating through the app.

Thanks so much to all of you who have downloaded and given us feedback about Darkroom! Your support means a lot to us, and we’ll be sure to update you as we make changes to our product.

The Darkroom Team

The relentless march of progress continues! Matt and I are stoked to share 1.2 with you guys. We’ve updated most of our filters and completely rebuilt McKinley, Carson, and Shasta. A lot of time was spent making sure Darkroom maintains its edge as the fastest photo editor on iOS, and we’ve added a new tool and a whole bunch of refinements along the way. Let’s dig into the new hotness…

Redesigned Filters

Every filter has been updated taking into consideration your feedback and lessons we’ve learned since we launched Darkroom almost two months ago.

McKinley

McKinley works really well for indoor portraits. It slightly increases the contrasts and casts a green hue, particularly in the shadows and adds a lot of warmth to skin tones.

Carson

Carson is a new, moody filter that works really well for urban and landscape photos. Constrasty, with a blue tint in the shadows, Carson adds a lot of emotion to and strength.

Shasta

Shasta is our nod to Velvia. Bright, contrasty, and colorful, Shasta will do beautiful thing to greens and yellows. Try it on landscape photos and photos with a lot of color.

Fade

We’ve added a new slider to the Basic Adjustments tool: Fade. It works great for photos with a lot of harsh blacks and whites. We’ve also moved vignette up the stack. The two work well together to add a lot of mood.

iCloud Photo Library (Beta)

Darkroom will now download photos from iCloud allowing you to edit your entire photo library, whether it’s on the device or in The Cloud™

Pinch to Close

Added a new gesture to pinch & rotate to dismiss back to the grid. Happy swiping!

Encore

• Blacks and Whites are now supported in the RGB channel!
• We’ve updated how we synchronize with your photo library so it’s much, much faster for large libraries. If you have more than 30,000 photos, it used to crash when you save or open the app. No more!
• Improved the performance of opening and closing photos from the grid. Should be smooth as butter!
• Vignette is now earlier in the pipeline which means you can add a fade or a tone in Curves and apply a vignette behind it
• Added more descriptive labels to curve operations in history.
• Tapping above and below the curve to move it by 1 percent now properly registers a history operation
• Added the ability to pinch/rotate down to dismiss the photo\

The Darkroom Team

This is the fourth installment in our weekly series exploring mobile photography and Darkroom. The first three lessons 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, how to properly compose them to tell the right story, and how to expose them 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.

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, 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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is the third installment of the weekly series exploring photography and post processing. In the previous lessons, we discussed Exposure and 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.

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.

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.

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 for some inspiration.

As always, have fun with it!

This is the second installment of the weekly series exploring mobile photography and post processing. In last week’s post, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

This is the fifth installment in our weekly series exploring mobile photography and Darkroom. Explore the rest here.

This is the second of two parts on Using Curves in Darkroom. Last week, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 ;)

This is the eighth installment in our weekly series exploring mobile photography through the lens of Darkroom. You can view all the articles here.

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.

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-part 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.

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, so it felt like it needed its own section.

The 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:

Adding Color and Tone

When I recently asked on Twitter 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.

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.

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.

To get the ultimate control over the color of your photos however, switch over to the Curves Tool.

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-part 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.

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.

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.

Phew. Ok. Let’s dig in.

What is the Color Tool?

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.

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?”

Happy Editing!

A whole new app

It’s finally here! Darkroom 2 is a milestone release with more than 14 new features covering every area of the product, an updated design reflecting the focus and simplicity of Darkroom, and an updated brand.

Grab a download hot off the presses!

Building on the foundation and promise we laid out with our initial release and based on your invaluable feedback, Darkroom 2 is a mature, full-featured photo editor that truly brings the power of professional photo editing within the grasp of the casual mobile photographer.

There’s a lot to be said, and a lot to be shown, so let’s jump in and touch on all the new goodness. Here are the major new features of Darkroom 2.

The Pro Kit

Curves, our innovative and radically easy-t0-use curve editor is joined by two new professional-grade editing tools: Color and Tone, all packaged together into a single In-App Purchase along with Filter Sharing (more on that below).

The Color Tool

Unleashing the full expressive range of desktop-grade color grading, the Color tool provides the ability to adjust the hue, saturation, and luminance of individual colors. The sky is too blue? Desaturate the blue. The grass is too yellow? Pull up the green hue.

When combined with the Curves tool, filters in Darkroom take on a whole new dimension. An entire range of cross processed filters become possible, and the depth of emotion and tonality you can achieve is stunning.

As a courtesy to our early supporters, photographers who purchased Curves will get the Pro Kit as an automatic and free upgrade.

Filter Sharing

Included as part of the Pro Kit In-App Purchase, you can now share your custom filters publicly using our unique one-step install mechanism. Using an on-image code, you can share your filters to your friends and followers on Instagram, and they can install them right from within their feed by taking a screenshot. That’s it! As your filters spread, photographers will have a link back to your Instagram profile, helping you build an audience and a following.

Every week, we will feature the best shared filter, shining a spotlight on a variety of styles and techniques, building a community around a shared love of photography.

Premium Filter Packs

Darkroom has always shipped with 12 premium filters right off the bat. These filters are all updated given the new capabilities of the Pro Kit, and they’re joined by four new premium filter packs available for purchase within the Darkroom Store.

We spent weeks iterating on these filter packs making sure that they cover a wide range of looks and and styles, and making sure they reflect modern tastes and styles. These filter packs are named after their intended styles or use-cases.

Workflow 2.0

Darkroom’s core premise is that the best photo editor is one that combines workflow innovation as much as editing tools. To that end, we’ve supercharged Darkroom’s workflow capabilities with version 2. Here are the highlights

Favorite & Delete

Now you can favorite and delete any photo while viewing it, helping you cut down on the clutter in your camera roll, and manage it as it grows over time. These changes are integrated to the system-wide iOS library.

Alongside favoriting and deleting, we’ve introduced two new sections to the main library view: Favorites, and Edited, to help you manage and curate your photo library. Within each photo, you can now favorite and delete, and your actions are integrated into Apple’s core iOS photo library.

In addition, you can now Copy & Paste the edits of one photo onto another, and when sharing, you can Save the image without having a duplicate in the library.

New Share Services

To further reduce clutter in your camera roll, Darkroom 2 adds “Save” as a new share option, overwriting the original photo in your system library, which allows you to continue editing in other applications without duplicates.

Also, Save as Square Photo, our radically simple one-button solution to share non-square photos to Instagram now gains the ability to inset the photo to provide borders.

Full List of Changes

Phew! Quite the list, and that’s just the major changes! Here’s a list of all the new features in Darkroom 2:

• Color Tool
• Tone Tool
• Filter Sharing
• Premium Filter Packs
• Filter Strength
• Favorite Photo
• Delete Photo
• Library Sections
• Add inset to Square Photo
• Modify Original Photo / Revert to Original
• Copy & Paste Edits
• Revamped and much improved Brightness and Contrast algorithms
• Rename Filter
• Reset Filter / Update Filter
• 5:4 and 4:5 aspect ratio support
• … and many bug fixes and design improvements throughout.

We hope you enjoy using Darkroom 2. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at feedback@bergen.co

The Darkroom Team

The tone is going to be a bit different for this one. If you’ve checked your App Store updates recently, you may or may not have seen me basically have a meltdown in the release notes. I owe you an update, an apology, and an explanation.

Let’s start on a high note:

Introducing Darkroom 2.1

I’m thrilled to have released Darkroom 2.1 a week ago. Here’s what was new:

TIFF Support

We’ve listened to your feedback, and we’ve added the ability to edit (but not export…yet) TIFF files! In earlier versions of Darkroom, this was accidentally, half-way supported. In Darkroom 2 we removed this functionality, and were surprised by how many people edit TIFFs in Darkroom, so we re-enabled it.

Sort by Date Added

This has been personally frustrating me for a long time. When Matt and I were first developing Darkroom, we wanted to mimick the behavior of the Photos app. When iOS 8 came out, it turns out there are two feeds of your photos: Moments, and All Photos. One was sorted by the capture date, and one was sorted by the modified date. If you were editing an old photo and you saved a copy, its capture date was still old, so it was hidden in your library. Worse, if you added a photo to your iPhone that was captured earlier (Like, through Dropbox), those photos were also hidden in the list of photos.

Now, in the Album Selector, you have the option of sorting by Date Added, or Date Created (Still the default). The choice is sticky, meaning when you change it, that change will hold, even if you restart the app.

Conserve Battery

A lot of users reported that Darkroom was consuming large amounts of battery. That’s because for heavy users, the sliders were re-rendering the image hundreds of times over the course of a single adjustment. For fast phones, this isn’t a problem at all — The phone might get a bit hot, but it’s no biggie. On slower devices however, the devices were having trouble keeping up with the increased demands of Darkroom 2. So we added a new “Conserve Battery” setting that is on by default on iPhone 5, 5C, and 4S. When turned on, this setting disables the live preview of the sliders.

We encourage you to play with it. Over the course of this feature’s development, we were surprised how big of an impact it made on our editing process. By disabling the live preview, you’re able to see the before and after of each individual adjustment more clearly, since the change is not incremental.

Happy times, right?

Introducing Darkroom 2.2

Well, we released Darkroom 2.1 then this happened:

That, friends, is a graph of our crash rate. Guess when Darkroom 2.1 came out.

Anywho, turns out the code we were using to detect which device model you were using had a race condition that could cause slower devices to crash. Suffice it to say, your valiant knight got on the case, and promptly fixed the issue.

Now I can relax and celebrate, right?

Introducing Darkroom 2.3

The day after, I start getting reports of features being broken on iOS 9. Turns out, due to me being on vacation in New York City and then busy with another project I’ve been working on, I didn’t test iOS 9 as thoroughly as I should have. In fact, I didn’t do much testing, assuming that the lack of complaints from existing beta testers was an indication that there wasn’t a problem. That is a completely amateur mistake on my part, and I apologize for the inconvenience it has caused you in using Darkroom.

Anyway, Darkroom 2.3 fixes the blocking issues. There are still a couple of issues but they’re low-priority and I’m fixing them as I write this. Well, not at the same time, but you know what I mean.

I’ll send out an update in the next few days on the new project I’m working on, and it’ll explain why things have been a bit hectic. Thank you so much for using Darkroom. I love you.

The Darkroom Team

Friends, It’s been a while since we last talked. Darkroom 2.4 was released in mid-October of last year. A full explanation for the delay will come later, I’ll keep this post as concise as the update itself. Suffice it to say we’re busy working on the next big update, and early indications are that it’s going to be a very big and awesome update. Can’t wait to share more details with you!

Changes in 2.5:

• Fixes a bug where photos on 4" devices (iPhone 5, 5S, and 5SE) had the wrong aspect ratio
• Fixes a bug where the app won’t load on iOS 10 Beta 5
• Fixes a bug where photos won’t load on iPads
• Removes the filter sharing option (This was a seldom-used feature that was very expensive when starting up the app)
• Fixes bugs with loading of URLs in Settings

The Darkroom Team

Let’s get to the fun stuff first: To celebrate Darkroom’s 2 year anniversary, we’re announcing a 30% sale across the board for 1 week only. Open up the app, go buy all those filter packs and tools you’ve been putting off at a discount. Hurry!

We’re also sharing a new house-keeping update: Darkroom 2.6. It won’t impact your Darkroom experience much, but it addresses a bunch of issues some of our users have been dealing with and reporting. Here’s the low-down:

Darkroom 2.6 Changelog:

• When rotating an image that hasn’t explicitly been cropped the cropped area now remains the maximum size. Previously, the crop region would not rotate with the image.
• The As Shot option in the Crop tool now properly resets to the maximum size.
• The “Buy ProKit” flow has been updated to be less confusing, making it clearer you can either just buy ProKit or use our Limited-Time Offer to buy everything at a discount.
• The on-boarding flow for new users got an update, making the whole process shorter, and making restoring your previous purchases much simpler.
• In Settings there now is a Help section available with easy access to tutorials and frequently asked questions and our Darkroom Sunday School tutorials.

Now Let Me Get Sentimental

On this day two years ago, Matt Brown and I got into work early and launched Darkroom after 8 months of hard work. We watched as country after country around the world lit up with little red dots marking the app being featured by Apple in the iTunes Store internationally, and validating our decision to localize the app in 11 languages.

The premise behind the app was two fold:

Editing workflows are inefficient, and creative tools are limiting

Two year ago, Snapseed, VSCO, and Afterlight were the dominant players. In large part, they defined the space, and set its standards. But as iOS and the camera evolved, the needs and the scale of mobile photography exploded, and the tools remained stagnant. Darkroom was born out of our frustration with the status quo, and our vision for what mobile photography is capable of. Darkroom’s success has validated that our premise was true back then, and it continues to be true today.

That premise upon which we built Darkroom manifested itself in two ways: No-import editing, and Custom Filters. Apple recognized our innovation a month after our launch, when they named Darkroom the Best App of February.

Press coverage was unanimously positive:

Darkroom For iOS is The Photo App You Always Wanted
_Darkroom, a new photo app for iOS which was released today, hopes to bring some pro-level tools to the iPhone and…_thenextweb.com

Darkroom: A New iOS Photo Editor with DIY Filters, Curves, and Infinite History
_Darkroom is a new photo editor for iPhones that just launched today. The app offers a number of powerful features for…_petapixel.com

Best New Apps: Darkroom
_A number of us here at The Verge are big fans of VSCO cam, myself included. But I'm never completely satisfied with the…_www.theverge.com

Six months after our initial launch, after the dust settled, we got back to work on Darkroom 2. Truth be told, Darkroom 2 is what we wanted to launch originally, but we made the decision to space it out, validate our core propositions and assumptions before investing more deeply into the long-tail of features.

That’s why only six months after the release of the first Darkroom, we announced Darkroom 2, featuring a whopping 14 new features. With its launch, we finally hit our initial goal: To give mobile photographers the same tools that filter editors use to create filters. They can become masters of their own style.

In December, when they named Darkroom a Best New App of 2015 and featured it in their global Make Something New ad campaign.

In a final show of support, Darkroom was installed on all iPhone across the world in Apple stores as a demo app.

The Long Quiet

Whereas Darkroom’s first year was defined by activity, releases, tutorials, and awards, Darkroom’s second year has been defined by inaction and silence.

Darkroom at various points was either a two-man operation, or a one-man operation with advisors after Matt left the company. So, while Darkroom was going through all this activity, across the Atlantic, the migrant crisis was unfolding.

As a Syrian-American, I took it upon myself to document the ciris that was affecting my family and many of the people I grew up with. I enlisted the skills of my friend Sara Kerens and we both spent 10 weeks to document the crisis in a photo book.

During that time, I took a break from Darkroom. Truth be told, I anticipated the project taking no more than 3 months when I set out on it. Now however, 14 months later, I could not have been more wrong. In those 14 months, work on Darkroom all but ceased. I was consumed with the book and ensuring that we do justice to the project and the subject matter.

Yet despite this lack of activity, Darkroom has been extremely resilient. More than just that in fact, it has thrived. Writers continue writing about it. Photographers continue using it, and new photographers continue to discover how powerful and efficient mobile photo editing is with Darkroom.

The best photo editing app for the iPhone - The Sweet Setup
_For the past month, we've been experimenting with two dozen of the best-rated photo manipulation apps for iOS. It's a…_thesweetsetup.com

The trust that our early adopters have demonstrated in the product and the excitement that our new adopters share with us has kept our spirits high and our commitment strong.

The Long Run Forward

There will be a longer-form article in the future to describe in more detail what the future of Darkroom will look like, but I wanted to use this opportunity to share a high level vision.

We’ve watched time and again mobile photo editing apps launch, find early success, and then ultimately go down one of two paths: The Kitchen-Sink, or The Social Network. The reason is quite simple: Economics. The economics of mobile applications are brutal. Depending on whether or not the developer decided to take on external venture funding, they either have to continuously release new in-app purchases, often resorting to novelty, or pursue hockey-stick user growth at all costs.

It is in our estimation that this ecosystem starves the market of useful, thoughtful, professional-grade tools that address structural problems in the life of professional creatives.

Bergen, the parent company of Darkroom which I started 2.5 years ago, has always operated under the following banner:

Creative Tools for Creative Professionals

So often in today’s climate, creative professionals are left behind as the pursuit of growth gradually opens up the target audience and tries to make something everybody wants. In the end, we have tools that do many things nobody needs.

We do not divide the world into consumers and professionals. We divide the world into professionals and aspiring professionals. We want to enable professionals to do their job well, efficiently, and consistently. Similarly, we want to enable aspiring professionals to elevate themselves by lowering the expectation gap.

This philosophy will continue to manifest itself in Darkroom moving forward, and I can’t wait to share more about this vision with you in time. Meanwhile, expect more regular updates as we pick up the pace again.

Until the next time, happy editing! The Darkroom Team

Following through on our promise last month to pick up the pace of updates, we’re excited to share with you the biggest update since Darkroom 2 was launched. Darkroom 2.7 is here, and with it a bunch of new UI updates, and a brand new, marquee feature: Filter Backup & Restore.

Here’s Filter Backup & Restore Works

People repeatedly tell us in feedback how attached they become to their custom filters in Darkroom. Those filters, used time and again, have become an essential part of our customers’ online brands, and expression of their personality, and a core part of their photograhy life. That’s why we’re so excited to finally address one of the most requested features by our users with the launch of Filter Backup & Restore.

Like everything else in Darkroom, the beauty is in the simplicity of the feature. All you need to use the feature is an active iCloud account, and you’re all set up to use it! Simple go to Settings, then tap Backup Filters. Ta da! That’s all you need to do!

In the background, Darkroom uploads your user filters to Apple’s secure iCloud servers where only you have access to your private files.

Here’s the magic trick: Because you can log in to the same iCloud account on multiple devices, it means you can restore your backups on all your devices! Think of it as a manual syncing of your user-filters!

Other Big Little Changes

We’ve completely redesigned the Share experience, and we’ve renamed it to “Export”. Along the way, we’ve dropped sharing to explicit third party apps, and we’ve dropped the “Save as Square Photo” feature.

When we launched Darkroom 2, Instagram still had a square limitation. That meant anyone who wanted to own their composition was forced to use any number of apps and intermediate steps to add a white border to make a square photo contain a non-square photo with a white border. In our effort to streamline the mobile photographer’s workflow, we integrated that feature right into Darkroom, and we made it as easy as a single button.

Since then however, a couple of things have changed. Obviously, Instagram now allows you to share non-square photos, but also, sharing directly to third party apps has stopped being supported as well, meaning the custom metadata we were able to share was no longer allowed. Finally, our data indicated that the vast majority of users simply never used those features. So, as per our iterative product philosophy, we’re taking time to trim features and improve the performance of the app, rather than throw the kitchen sink at the problem.

We’re really proud of the community we’ve built around Darkroom and we love hearing from you about how you use Darkroom and what you’d love to see in it. Please don’t hestitate to share your thoughts with us at feedback@bergen.co

Full Release Notes

• Added Backup and Restore for your custom filters! Now simply go to Settings and manually Backup your custom filter creations, and easily Restore when either upgrading to a new or extra device. The only requirement is an active iCloud account!
• Renamed “Share” to “Export” for clarity. We also redesigned and simplified the export experience.
• Removed the Save as Square and third-party share shortcuts from Export. You will find the same options under “Other Services”
• Swapped out the custom font we used for Apple’s lovely system standard San Francisco font (https://developer.apple.com/fonts/).
• All our in app icons have been updated to be a touch friendlier (softer corners), to be simpler (fewer objects), and where tweaked where possible to better explain their function.

The Darkroom Team

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 Preset” 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 preset. 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 presets (And all the other preset 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 presets 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.

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).

How presets 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 presets.

I’m not sure what they’re technically called, but for the sake of this article, let’s call them preset artists.

What a preset 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 preset artist, and it defines the preset. 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 presets. When you apply one of those presets 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 preset 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 presets. Each app can be slightly different from the others by adding a feature here or there, or by hiring really good preset artists, but they’re all fundamentally the same:

Import > Open > Apply preset > 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 preset! 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 preset 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 preset, 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 presets 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 preset artists use to generate the LUTs, and to port them to your phone. In Darkroom, presets are instructions for generating the color mapping on the fly.

Here’s where this comes into play: Suppose I apply Darkroom’s A100 preset on my photo, but the rich green tones in the shadows aren’t working for me. In Darkroom, I can apply the preset, then use the Curves tool to alter the preset itself. If I see myself doing the same thing repeatedly, I can save those new instructions as my very own preset. Because Darkroom skips the import flow of all the other apps, my editing flow is thus reduced to:

Open > Apply Filter > Save

Except, the Preset I’m applying is my own, containing all my custom edits.

Now that the fundamental concepts of how LUTs, colorspaces, traditional presets, and Darkroom presets all work is out of the way, let’s get back to the original point.

How to Recreate a VSCO Preset

Technically speaking, you can pass a blank LUT through any preset 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 preset 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, and the Color tool in Darkroom. The former modifies the tones, the latter modifies the colors. Since these are the primary tools used for creating presets in Photoshop and Lightroom, we will generate a specific color palette which we will use to isolate changes to those two tools.

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 preset. In this case, we’ll be recreating F2.

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.

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:

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 preset 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:

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:

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:

You can see the top bar matches closely, but the colors at the bottom are off. The colors in the VSCO preset 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 preset exactly. You want to emulate the VSCO preset'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 preset:

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.

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:

And here’s how they stand next to the original VSCO Palette:

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:

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 preset comes back. We want to match the preset by feel, not by technicality.

I upped the luminance of the green and yellow, et voila!

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 preset created in this tutorial to our server so you can download it and play with it. I named the preset “Charlie” after the Twitter user 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 preset.

To install the Charlie preset, 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 presets every time you export a photo with changes from Darkroom, and matching the file name to the name of the preset. I number my attempts like commits in a git code repository. It took 9 attempts to match this preset. Enjoy the process!

The Darkroom Team

This month’s update is a little early. Sometimes, things just work out that way! This one is a little smaller, but it builds on the work we did in 2.7. Let me summarize the changes for you:

Changes in 2.8:

1. Addressing one of the longest-running UX issues in the app, the navigation bar in Darkroom is finally persistent when in the editing view! You no longer have to swipe down to share, and you no longer have to swipe down twice to go back to the library. This change is enabled by the redesign of the Export flow in 2.7 which dropped the Save as Square photo.
2. The “Other Services” share dialog now integrates deeply with third party apps. Instead of the plain text Instagram share option, you get the “Copy to Instagram” share option which uses Instagram’s native share dialog. (Thanks @kevinshay for the tip)
3. Updated the app’s interstitials to disappear faster.

With the details out of the way, I’d like to share some thoughts about why we made this change and how this update reflects our product philosophy, which you’ll see reflected in the app as we continuously update and revise it.

From the moment Darkroom went from a simple HSL adjustment tool to a full fledged photo editor, it was clear to me that the key to distinguishing the app in the extremely crowded field of iOS photo editors was going to be the speed of the workflow.

I spent months ensuring that the photo editor would be as powerful as Lightroom-in-your-pocket, and as fast and seamless as the native Photos app. We optimized our design process around a metric we called TTF: Time-To-Filter.

One aspect of the workflow we wanted to address as well was the number of apps we, and the photographers we were meeting, were using to get the results they wanted. Photographers were moving from app to app, using individual features from each app. One of those apps, was used to add a white letterbox around a landscape or portrait photo to circumvent Instagram’s square constraint. That app was reduced in Darkroom to a single button; A defining accomplishment of our philosophy.

However, that feature constrained us in an important way: To know what the photo would look like with the border and the inset, you had to see it, which meant the Share experience had to accommodate a full-image preview. When combined with the fact that we were building for an iPhone 5S in 2014 and our own self-imposed constraint to never overlay the photo with any UI, we were stuck. We resorted to adding the now-familiar swipe-down-to-share UI, which unfortunately ruined our linear workflow.

In 2.7, acknowledging that the 5/5S/SE form factor was now the minority device size, and that Instagram had long ago dropped its square constraint, we followed suit by removing the Save as Square option. Once we did, we quickly realized that we no longer needed to show a full image preview when sharing, which allowed us to make the navigation bar persistent in 2.8. Now, finally, the workflow in Darkroom is linear: Tap to open a photo, tap to filter, then tap to export, without having to rewind. Tada!

Moving forward, this change will continue to enable us to invest in improving the efficiency of the workflow and how fast you can navigate through your library, make changes, and reflect those edits back into your Camera Roll.

Some really exciting things are in our pipeline, and I’m dying to share them with you ❤

The Darkroom Team

In these posts, we discuss what’s new in each update and the background behind it. We hope you find these in-depth explorations insightful.

Here in LA, actors like to say “One for you, one for me.” This update started out being a “one for me” update. That is, it’s an update to how we bundle and sell in-app purchases, and I don’t expect longtime fans of the app to be particularly excited about the update. Yet as we fleshed out what this update would include and started implementing it, it started to feel more like “One for you, AND one for me!”, making Darkroom easier than ever to use, and fulfilling our desire to help more people than ever become better photographers. Before we get into it though, let’s get the logistics out of the way:

Changes in this release

• Discover & Try: completely rethought the way to discover and try our Premium Filters and the Pro Color and Curves tools.

• Now when trying Darkroom’s premium filters and pro tools there’s a single, consistently accessible and discoverable location in the app to purchase the filters and tools.
• The Curves tool now has handles on the curve line to make initial usage more intuitive, and color gradient vertical tracks to help explain the curves handles effect. (partly inspired by Denny Tang’s Tips video suggesting improvements for Tone Curves Tools).
• Sliders now have color gradients to explain their effects. This is particularly powerful with the Split Tone tool, Color tool (Premium Upgrade), and Temperature sliders.
• In the Color tool it’s now also easier to understand what color has been changed, and how it has been changed.
• The Filters tool now accommodates the presence of the all available premium filter even without purchasing them so they are easier to discover and try.
• The Split Tone Tool is now free, previously a premium feature, you’ll find it right at the bottom of the Adjustment tool.

Other Changes

• Made the header bars in the app smaller to reduce the chrome footprint and focus more on the photos.
• Adjusted the Crop tool to better fit in iPhone SE-sized devices.
• Improved the state in which Darkroom didn’t have Photo Access rights, making it clearer and easier to grant access.
• Improved the states for the Favorite and Edited tabs when no photos are favorited or edited yet.
• Assorted bug fixes throughout

Background

Darkroom is an independent and bootstrapped company, built and maintained by two people, and has been for much of its life (Shout-out to Matt Brown who c0-founded the company with me).

We’re blessed with Darkroom to have a very healthy and sticky product that’s repeatedly featured by Apple and experiences organic growth. However, to thrive, we need to improve the conversion of our for-pay products.

I’ll admit at this point that I’ve often left monetization to be the last task before a launch. I’m a product-minded person, and I see the world in use-cases and features and bug fixes. I’m not a business-minded person who sees the world primarily in conversion funnels and market opportunities. However, the balance of the two is where a business thrives. My product plans rarely involve monetization and sales, focusing rather on product features and workflow inefficiencies. This is the first time we decided to focus primarily on monetization.

Darkroom’s original business plan was to sell filter packs à la VSCO, and sell Pro Tools à la TouchRetouch. We created a Store and put the filter packs in it, and we put the tools in the toolbar, with a modal to unlock them. Bada-bim, bada-boom, we had a monetization strategy.

We had conversations early on to allow people to try filters and tools before buying them, but we decided against that approach for a few reasons we found convincing at the time:

1. People might not know how to use Curves/Color, and if they play around with them for a few seconds and achieved an unpleasing effect, they may be turned off from exploring them anyway further.
2. People would be able to just copy our filters
3. People would be able to use the tools for free, screenshot the edited image, and bypass our monetization strategy.
4. By using stock images to promote our tools and filters, we can create an aspirational marketing message, as opposed to the functional message we’d be sending otherwise.

That conversation happened in 2014.

The Plan

We had anticipated before starting work on Darkroom that Filter packs would be the primary sellers, and Pro Tools would sell less, but at a higher price. Since then, through natural iteration on the product, the only entry-way into the filter store became the end of the filters list in the filters tool. That meant the path for a person to discover the existence of filter packs looked like this:

Open app > Tap on a photo > Expand toolbar > Select Filters tool > Scroll past the last filter > Tap on the unlabeled Store icon.

It doesn’t take a lot of experience with product development to look at that path and assume the conversion between the first step to the last step would be near-zero, and our sales numbers confirmed the fact.

Our tools, the primary differentiator of the app, were similarly hidden. In the toolbar, we had two pink icons, tapping either would present a modal with a single sentence describing the tool, and a few stacked screenshots.

Not to state the obvious, we knew we had some low-hanging fruit to pick. Driven by the understanding that as barriers to entry are lowered, conversion increases. We decided to challenge the assumptions we made in 2014.

1. If we assume the people using our app want to do the right thing, and if we give them the respect of assuming they’re intelligent and capable photographers, then we can assume that they understand what the Curves and Color tools do. Furthermore, it’s our job as designers and engineers to make the tools easier to use and understand.
2. If people want to go through all the steps of transcribing the individual edits of a filter and recreate them later, they likely aren’t the kind of person who would’ve paid for any of them in the first place. We shouldn’t block dishonest people at the cost of honest people.
3. We can easily detect a potentially malicious screenshot to bypass paying for the app. We chose to turn that into an opportunity to remind people that Darkroom is a small independent operation.
4. The most aspirational message we can give people is the aspiration of becoming professional photographers. Those who don’t know what Curves and Color correction tools are, are the most capable of learning and growing, and we should help them by providing access to the tools.

That’s why in Darkroom 2.9, we’ve made every Pro Tool and all Premium Filters available to fully try for all people for free. We only ask you to pay when you’re happy with your photos and want to share them.

Getting there wasn’t easy. Like any other core product change, it took a lot of iteration to reach the right balance of clarity and usability. In the end, we’re really proud of what we achieved. We hope you like these changes.

You can see in this gif of the first pass how visually forceful we made the upsell. What you can’t see is that we made it lock you into the tool you were in.

Clearly, we were still worried about giving away our premium filters and tools so freely to people, but we knew that the intensity of the upsell and the disruption of the lock-in felt wrong in Darkroom. It wasn’t clear what the solution would be. Eventually, after many conversations and iterations, we settled on a color, placement, size, and behavior combination that felt native to Darkroom, and clear to the user.

The “For You” Part

That was all “For Me”. Now let’s talk about what you have to be excited about.

Since we opened up the tools to every single person who downloads Darkroom, it unleashed an unintended incentive structure.

Because the profile of the person who would be consuming the pro tools has changed, and the context under which they use them has changed, we had to update the design of those core tools to accommodate those people. In the process, we’ve refined and tightened up what was already the best-in-class Curve editor and Color Correction tool.

There were two core philosophies behind these changes:

1. It should be clear to the person how they need to interact with the tools
2. It should be clear to the person what the outcome of those interactions will be.

In Curves, this means knobs on tracks, similar to how sliders work. It also means that the tracks of those sliders visualize the impact of the change.

In Curves, it means gradients on the slider tracks to indicate what color you are shifting to, and increased contrast between which color channels have changed and which have not.

This philosophy really carried over to almost every other part of the app, making Darkroom easier than ever to use, and fulfilling our desire to help more people than ever become better photographers.

Please let us know what you think! We’re so excited to share this with you and have so much more in store.

The Darkroom Team

It’s Monday in Amsterdam! We’re busy here working along the beautiful canals getting fresh bits ready for your consumption. Fresh out the oven:

• Haptic feedback — We’ve sprinkled haptics throughout the experience where we felt it made sense. Our primary objective was to provide weight and tactility to the app, and we tried to be judicious but generous where it mattered. We think it adds a nice physical dimention to the experience of the app, and hope you like it. Here’s where you can look for it:

• Sliders: When you hit the minimum and maximum values of the sliders

• Tools: When you switch tools

• Navigation: When you expose the tools and hide the tools

• In-App Notifications: When an alert with a message appears

• Fix touch responsiveness and behavior of all the sliders — This one is particularly noticeable for those of you who use Darkroom on iPhone SE-sized devices. A couple of sneaky bugs crept into the codebase and caused a lot of erroneous touches as you dragged the sliders. We also improved the layout of Curves and its handles, to improve the accuracy of which region you manipulate.

It’s a small update, but don’t let its size lull you into a sense of idleness. The oven is full, and it’s working overtime!

Talk to you soon!
The Darkroom Team