New Darkroom update benefits from a re-worked grain slider

Darkroom Grain Changes
Darkroom Grain Changes (Image credit: Jasper Hauser)

What you need to know

  • Darkroom for iOS has been updated with a re-worked grain slider.
  • We're told the new slider is faster, more efficient, and more natural.

Hugely popular image editing app Darkroom has been updated with a newly re-worked grain slider, making it faster and better to use while also improving results along the way.

According to a blog post by Darkroom's Jasper Hauser, improvements include speedier render times when exporting videos as well as changes that should ensure a more consistent grain structure.

With cameras capable of capturing pin-sharp images, why would you want to add grain to them after the fact? That's something Hauser covers in his post.

There are many technical reasons why you may want to introduce film grain to your photo, but artistically it's about richness and nostalgia. It introduces an emotionality and a mood to your photo that the often clinical look of tone mapped, de-noised digital digital images of today cannot capture.

If that sounds like something you can buy into, the update now integrates grain using a luminosity curve to make the grain look "closer to the real thing." There's a ton more as well, so I'd heartily suggest you read the full post to see what this new update has in store.

New Darkroom Grain Slider

New Darkroom Grain Slider (Image credit: Darkroom)

You can download the updated Darkroom from the App Store now. It's free with optional in-app purchases for subscriptions.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.