Darkroom

Read Cult of Mac’s latest posts on Darkroom:

Apple Design Awards celebrate the year’s most beautiful, innovative iOS apps

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Apple Design Awards 2020: These are the eight apps Apple thinks you should check out.
These are the eight apps Apple thinks you should check out.
Photo: Apple

The eight winners of this year’s Apple Design Awards showcase “outstanding app design, innovation, ingenuity, and technical achievement,” the company said Monday.

Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of worldwide developer relations, said the four apps and four games honored “inspire not only their peers in the Apple developer community, but all of us at Apple, too.”

Amazing Darkroom photo app now does video

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Darkroom, the amazing iOS photo-editing app, now edits video
Darkroom, the amazing iOS photo-editing app, now edits video
Photo: Darkroom

Darkroom, one of the best photo library and editing apps on iOS, is now also one of the best video library and editing apps on iOS. In today’s update, Darkroom adds support for editing your videos. Not cutting and chopping them up, like iMove, but changing how they look, as if you were applying filters and edits to a still photograph. And the along thing is, it’s instant, just as fast as editing a still image.

Pixelmator Photo first impressions: An amazing iPad image editor [Review]

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Pixelmator Photo should be on every photographer’s iPad.
Pixelmator Photo should be on every photographer’s iPad.
Photo: Nuria Gregori

Pixelmator Photo, a new image-editing app for iPad, gives you tons of tools for tweaking your images. The app lets you apply filters, crop, trim and generally making your photos look great.

In this regard, Pixelmator Photo is like a zillion other photo apps for iOS. What sets it apart are a) the now-expected Pixelmator polish, and b) machine learning that powers pretty much everything.

I’ve taken the app, which launches today, for a quick spin, and it’s pretty great. The photo-editing space is so crowded with great apps, though, that we’re spoiled for choice. How does Pixelmator Photo match up?

The best iOS apps of 2018 [Year in Review]

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Year in Review Best iOS apps 2018
Don’t miss out on these awesome iOS apps.
Image: Killian Bell/Cult of Mac

Cult of Mac Year in Review 2018There are almost 2 million apps available on iOS today, and yet in 2018, 10 years after the App Store opened its doors, developers continue to deliver new and unique titles that blow us away.

We’ve rounded up the very best from the past year right here. We have terrific text editors, fantastic photography apps, amazing utilities, and lots more.

Darkroom for iPad, Audiobus, Filmic Pro, and other great apps of the week

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What a festive feast of apps we have for you this week.
What a festive feast of apps we have for you this week.
Photo: Cult of Mac

Oh man, just Darkroom for iPad is enough for this week — it’s that good. If you only use it to browse your photo library it’s worth the download. Also check out Audiobus’ new MIDI learn, Filmic Pro’s crazy, storage-filling new high-Bitrate option, and Agenda’s image and file attachments.

Lightroom-busting Darkroom comes to iPad

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In the olden days, this was the only way to edit your photos.
In the olden days, this was the only way to edit your photos.
Photo: Agirldamednee/Flickr CC

Even if you don’t have much interest in editing RAW and JPG images on your iPad, you might still want to check out Darkroom. The brand-new iPad version of the popular photo app offers a view of your standard iCloud Photo Library that’s better-looking and easier to use than the native Photos app. And that’s just for starters.

iPhone photo-editing app Darkroom expands to iPad

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Darkroom is making the jump from iPhone to iPad.
Darkroom is making the jump from iPhone to iPad.
Photo: Bergen

Darkroom is a photo-editing application that invites comparison to Adobe’s Lightroom. But it’s always had a limitation: the only version was for iPhone.

That’s about to change, as an iPad version is out in beta.

5 great apps that bust out the bokeh on iPhone XS and XR

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The iPhone XS' new bokeh tool is just the beginning.
The iPhone XS' new bokeh tool is just the beginning.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The iPhone XS camera is pretty incredible. The device uses its two rear cameras, plus the A12 chip’s Neural Engine, to record such an accurate 3D map of the scene that you can adjust the background blur with a slider. But that depth map is useful for more than just blurring backgrounds. It can be used by other apps to:

  • Add realistic lights to a scene.
  • Choose any subject to be in focus, not just the one you picked when shooting.
  • Add custom background blurs.
  • Remove and replace backgrounds, like movie green-screen effects.

The iPhone XS is the gold standard for iOS cameras, but the XR manages some excellent tricks of its own. Despite having only one rear camera, the XR can still recognise people, and then use AI and the super-powerful A12 Neural Engine to separate out the person form the background. While this portrait matte isn’t as detailed as an iPhone XS depth map, it can in theory still be used to do many of the same tricks.

Today we’ll look at the best depth apps for the new iPhone XS, XR, and XS Max.