Darkroom for iOS has just been updated to version 5.5, which brings a new grain slider to reduce memory usage, improve speed and aesthetic, and make it look closer to film grain.
According to Darkroom, the image “will now appear to be made up of grain rather than the grain being applied over the top as an overlay. This is particularly evident in bright areas.” Here’s what else has changed with this feature, which has been rebuilt by the team behind the app:
- Adding grain to videos no longer affects the playback frame rate
- Fixed a memory-related crash when exporting large images with grain
- Fixed grain in the Photos extension being too big
- Eliminated artifacts and repetitive patterns within the grain
- Improved grain for video by making it smaller
This update also brings a lot of fixed bugs with Crop & Transform and memory management. It also improves the loading indicators when viewing a photo to make an explicit difference between loading data locally from storage, and downloading data from iCloud. Darkroom 5.5 also adds a prompt to replace edits if existing local edits are different from remote edits.
Our new grain fixes this by integrating the grain using a luminosity curve, giving you a look closer to the real thing. Analog film grain is most noticeable in underexposed shadow and dark regions because there are not enough photons to activate the grain, while in bright and well exposed areas grain is barely noticeable. Our luminosity curve is modeled exactly that way, resulting in much more natural looking grain, one that is now more subtle in light areas and more pronounced in dark areas,” according to its blog post.
Last month, Darkroom added a robust Shortcuts integration on iPhone and iPad, bringing five different Shortcuts action. The Darkroom team explained that these actions run with the full power of the Darkroom app and can be configured to perform a variety of different tasks:
Darkroom is one of the most powerful photo editors for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The app is available on the App Store as a free download with in-app subscriptions.
All of this happens in the background with the full power of our app, not a resource-limited extension. You will be able to add a filter, set the filter intensity, inset on a frame, and now also crop to a preset and add your watermark to every photo or video processed. From there, you can save it out to a Files folder, upload to Instagram, you name it.
You can now automatically crop your photos to one of our standard aspect ratios. We’ll pick the biggest crop that will center-fit so you can easily run a 1:1 or 9:16 crop automation to prepare your photos for social media. We also brought this ability to Darkroom itself when pasting edits. If you copy edits of a photo, that was cropped using one of our aspect ratio presets, and apply them when you batch paste your edits, we’ll center-crop all those photos as well, making it even easier to have all your photos and videos look consistent.
