Dark-room revisited, by Martin Aggett

A while back I wrote a review of the Darkroom! application and was critical of the developer, saying that he should have put the application through more rigorous private beta testing before releasing it to the public. The app had some serious design flaws and memory leak problems that caused it to crash so often that it was unusable in my opinion. However, at the end of that review I said that I thought that the application had huge potential, and if the developer fixed the things I highlighted in my article I would give it another chance. Last week, Steven Chaitoff sent me a note and wanted to take me up on my offer to re-review his application – now titled Dark-Room (don't ask...).

Dark-Room version 2.2 is everything that version 1.0 should have been at it's inaugural Appstore release. Steven has fixed all of the things that caused me to discourage readers from buying this application the first time around. Let's take a look at some of my original complaints and see how they were addressed in this newest version.

Throughout my first review I made a running joke about how often the application crashed. If you tried to do anything more than open an image, hit the auto correct button, and quickly save it, the application was so unstable that it would crash within minutes of normal use. After my harsh opinions were published, the developer admitted that he needed to completely rewrite the code to handle memory more efficiently. Well, he has succeeded. I've been playing with the app for about a week and have yet to make it crash – I even tried to make it crash. I pushed the limits of Dark-Room by importing an image that I took with my Canon digital SLR (8.3 megapixel / 5MB) and tried to make it crash. Keep in mind that the application is designed to edit and save images taken with the built in (2.0/3.0 megapixel) iPhone camera, and it handled the large sunset image without any problems.

Based on this improvement alone Dark-Room would have earned my endorsement, but Steven has worked to improve the interface and functionality of Dark-Room by a significant margin. From the beginning, I was impressed with the way that the edit menu fades away to reveal just the image and the slider you're currently using. My only complaint was that occasionally the sliders were hard to “grab” and sometimes “stick” when trying to use them. Now the slider interface works flawlessly and I'm re-impressed with the ingenious design.

There are several other improvements that I could describe for you, but most of them are included in the app description.

Application Description (from App Store):

Darkroom is the perfect tool for anyone who wants to do precise image editing. Don't limit your creativity to contrived effects. Instead, control the look of pictures with comprehensive adjustments that let you change brightness and contrast, color levels, hue, saturation, and more. Adjustments are applied in real time so you can see exactly how your pictures look as you modify them.

Cropping pictures is as easy as tugging on their edges. Interactively distort images with multi-touch gestures to do transformations like rotating, rescaling, squeezing and stretching.

Choose pictures from your photo albums to get started editing. Or, take a photograph directly from Darkroom (iPhone only). Saving creates a copy of existing pictures so you don't overwrite your files.

Feature List:

• Brightness
• Contrast
• Red Level
• Blue Level
• Green Level
• White Level
• Black Level
• Hue
• Saturation
• Lightness
• Grayscale
• Auto Color
• Crop
• Rotate
• Aspect Scale
• Vertical Scale
• Horizontal Scale
• Undo/Redo

What's new:

• Open and save images in landscape mode
• Crop beneath toolbar and status bar when they are showing

You guys wouldn't trust me as a reviewer if I didn't throw a few negative comments into the mix.

These aren't really criticisms of the application, but more suggestions for the developer to include in future releases. One of the things that I'd like to see added is the ability to continue editing an image if you are interrupted by a phone call or need to quit editing unexpectedly. Right now, if you accept a call in the middle of editing an image you'll have to start over after you finish your call. I'd also like to see a button to rotate the image in specific degree increments (ie 90 degrees to fix an incorrectly oriented image) in addition to using the two finger twisting method which is sometimes hard to control.

Above: before “auto correcting”Above: after using "auto correct" featureAfter using this application for the past week, I would recommend it for readers of the iPhoneography blog for basic quick editing and correcting of images that didn't quite turn out right the first time.

AppStore Link: Dark-room - Price £0.59/$.99

Note from Editor: I managed to grab this app when it was on offer for FREE, and agree with Martin's findings, so at this new low price of just £0.59/$.99 this app now comes recommended, so if you haven't already got a photo editing app for you iPhone, then this one is worth considering.

Dark-room bargain

If you don't have a photo manipulation app on your iPhone, then now is the chance to get what I think has to be one of the best bargains currently in the AppStore.

Dark-room (previously Darkroom!) is now available for FREE!!!

Darkroom is the perfect tool for anyone who wants to do precise image editing. Don't limit your creativity to contrived effects. Instead, control the look of pictures with comprehensive adjustments that let you change brightness and contrast, color levels, hue, saturation, and more. Adjustments are applied in real time so you can see exactly how your pictures look as you modify them.

Cropping pictures is as easy as tugging on their edges. Interactively distort images with multi-touch gestures to do transformations like rotating, rescaling, squeezing and stretching.

Choose pictures from your photo albums to get started editing. Or, take a photograph directly from Darkroom (iPhone only). You can use Darkroom as an alternative to the built-in camera application. Saving creates a copy of existing pictures so you don't overwrite your files.
Features:

• Brightness & contrast
• Red, blue, & green levels
• White level & black level
• Hue, saturation & lightness
• Grayscale
• Auto color
• Crop
• Rotate
• Aspect scale
• Vertical & horizontal distort
• Undo/redo history

AppStore Link: Dark-room - Price FREE

Darkroom! becomes Dark-room

You may recall that back at the end of January, Martin Aggett reviewed Darkroom!, and in his summing up he said

"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."

Well last week I was contacted by Steven Chaitoff the developer to say he'd been working on the app, and that he had "added new features and made significant changes to fix bugs in the 1.0 version. In particular, users will find that the app is no longer prone to the frequent crashing that many people experienced."

In addition to the bug fixes the app has had a price reduction and been renamed to Dark-room.

Dark-room's features now include:

• Auto-rotation is now supported when you turn your device. This means landscape images can be edited in full screen.
• Parts of an image outside its frame are no longer cropped off. They are instead hidden, and when the frame changes, they will reappear.
• Adjustment sliders are much easier to grab. No longer 'sticky'.
• Real-time color adjustments are faster.
• Reset adjustments to their default value by double tapping.
• Move images around to position them anywhere within the frame.
• Touch gestures are more responsive.
• The image resize animation following a crop is smoother.
• The frame rectangle around the image is less obtrusive.
• New loading screen and the icon graphic

AppStore Link: Dark-room - Price £0.59 ($.99)