Darkroom! Review by Martin Aggett

Darkroom! Wait for version 2.0!

First, I'd like to thank Glyn for working with developers to secure promotion codes so we can try some of these photography applications without blindly purchasing apps based on the description and reviews. In the case of Darkroom, I'm happy that I was able to "purchase" the app with a promo code instead of paying for it.

Darkroom is an ambitious attempt at bringing a higher level of photo editing control to the iPhone. As a working photographer I'm regularly disappointed by the quality of images taken by my iPhone. Like most point and shoot or cell phone cameras there is little control over things like exposure and white balance when taking pictures. The resulting images are often over or under exposed and could use some minor tweaking after capture. This is where Darkroom comes in. Unfortunately, the application fails on several levels.

Above: Darkroom! crashingIt's tough to decide where to start when it comes to describing the applications shortcomings. I guess I'll begin with the most annoying faults and just keep typing until I get bored. By far, the most annoying "feature" is the constant crashing and freezing that happens if you edit an image for more than a few minutes. Don't bother to bombard me with comments explaining how I should reboot my iPhone after installing a memory intensive application. I've done that several times and the application continues to crash. There's nothing more frustrating than spending several minutes editing an image and getting it "just right" to have the application crash and force you to start over, and over, and over…

Let's see, what next? Ahh, here's a good one. When you open an existing image from your photo library that is vertical orientation it imports it into the app as horizontal. That seems like a minor inconvenience considering you can grab the image with two fingers and rotate it, but when you try to do that it crops/deletes the top and bottom of your image automatically. Interestingly (or not), it has the opposite problem when capturing images directly from the app itself. Using the in-app camera works fine for taking vertical shots but images taken horizontally are imported for editing as vertical. To overcome this bug you can pinch to shrink the image so it fits completely within the current crop boundaries, then rotate it using a two finger twist, then open-pinch to resize it, then just move the crop boundaries to match the size… oh crap, it crashed again – Really? Come on!
Above: Darkroom! orientation problemsAbove: Darkroom! orientation problemsI could go on about how the app doesn't have the option to do editing in landscape mode, or how the adjustment sliders are hard to "grab" and sometimes "stick", or how the app won't keep running for more than a few minutes (did I already mention that it crashes a lot– my bad), but I'd like to end this article on a more positive note. The developer did do a few things really well in my opinion.

I was most impressed with the functionality of the "Adjust" screen. When you press the adjustment button in the lower left corner it covers the image with a menu of sliders for things like brightness, contrast, saturation, and so on. When you grab one of the slider buttons, the rest of the menu fades away to reveal the image and the single slider bar. As you manipulate the slider it adjusts the image so that you can see the affect in real time. As our Guinness-chugging friends on the magic moving picture box say; "Brilliant!"
Above: Original photoAbove: Darkroom! corrected photoAnother great feature is the undo/redo buttons at the bottom of the screen. Being able to flip-flop back and forth between two versions of an image so you can do the eye doctor test of "better/worse" is fantastic. Also, the "Auto" option to automatically correct an image actually works fairly well at fixing minor issues like poor exposure.

As I'm sure you've surmised from my review, Darkroom wasn't ready for release as a 1.0 version application. The developer would have been better served to send this app to a handful of folks as an ad-hoc beta release and gotten some feedback before putting it out on the Appstore in its current state. Because I see this application having a ton of potential, I'll be keeping it on my phone as I anxiously await the next version, but for right now, I have to say give this app a pass until some of the bigger issues are resolved.

Martin is a freelance photojournalist based out of Seattle and used an iPhone 3G with OS 2.2 to review Darkroom.

Comments

[Andy]

Yep...that pretty much nails it. The UI is the best thing about this app (the slider functionality), otherwise...we all sit and wait for the great iPhone photo editing app. Adobe, are you listening? iPhotoshop anyone?

[Glyn Evans]

Following Martin's review, and the review of another reader (see http://fromthefoyer.tumblr.com/post/73444564/darkroom) I contacted the developer of Darkroom! regarding the crashing issues, and below was the reply I got.

"Hi Glyn,

Thanks for letting me know about the review.  Regarding stability/crashing, that's a major problem I've been combatting since the beginning.  It's that the iPhone just isn't terribly powerful (both CPU and memory), and it is very difficult to manage memory efficiently.  All the more so with graphics applications like mine that need a lot of horsepower.

That said, I am devoting much attention to this and recoding Darkroom's memory use so this will be a non-issue.  A fix is on the way.

Of note, the larger the images being manipulated, the more prone to crashing.  Images taken with iPhone's camera are large (1200x1600), but pictures, for example, in photo albums synced from iTunes are fairly low-res, and Darkroom processes these problem-free.

Best,
Steven"