Darkroom Review

Darkroom is a fairly effective if unspectacular photo editing tool. It'll do the job for you quickly and effectively, but it doesn't really offer much to make it stand out.

Quick to load and do pretty much everything else, you don't have to worry about a signup process or any other setup. Just allow it access to your photo library and go for it. Once you've picked out a photo, the various options open up to you via a series of icons at the bottom of the screen. You can resize photos to a specific ratio, as well as change angle to make them appear more interesting.

After that, you can move onto applying one of 12 filters to the image. For a change, all of these filters are actually quite useful. Each looks appropriate and there's not really a weak one in the bunch. That's convenient given the many filtering apps that offer dozens of options but only a few that you'd ever actually use. Alongside that are the usual array of brightness, contrast, and saturation settings, each applied via a slider. The free build doesn't include a curves section but $2.99 allows you to unlock curves and adjust the RGB channels with a flick of your finger.

At the end of your selection you can view a history of what's been done to the image, easily tapping on something to take it back a step or two. That's arguably Darkroom's most convenient feature, meaning you always feel fully in control of what's being done to your photo. It's easy to readjust things without worrying about making any mistakes.

While Darkroom doesn't hugely stand out in an overcrowded genre, it's still pretty effective. It does what you want from it and in a speedy manner, plus it's small in size, proving useful to those trying to combat bloated apps.