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.

This week we chill out with Chillscape, make music with Starlight, get excited for Darkroom on iPad, and something about sideloading audio.

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.

This week we check out podcast app Pocket Casts, add grain to our RAW images with Darkroom, and speed up the entire internet with Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1.

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.

This week we dim our Mojave screens down with a couple of Dark Mode utilities, we get a new Portrait HD mode in Darkroom, and learn how British English Siri pronounces “Fantastical.”