The old engine worked, and the team tore it down anyway. Darkroom 7, shipped in December 2025, rebuilt the photo and video editor's rendering engine from scratch: higher frame rates, a display pipeline tuned for accuracy, real-time edits on 8K video with a live histogram, and two film-style tools called Bloom and Halation. It's the biggest swing since video editing arrived in 2020, the same year the app won an Apple Design Award.
Darkroom is a photo and video editor for iPhone, iPad, and Mac built around one-tap AI masks and color grading. Select Subject, Background, or a radial region, then push brightness, contrast, and clarity inside that mask alone; the grading wheel and before-and-after split live one tool over. February's Winter Update added curated preset collections pulled from more than 3,500 community presets, with new layout controls for the preset grid.
PetaPixel's December coverage read the rebuild as overdue modernization, calling the result "more fluid, more predictable, and better equipped for professional-grade work." App Store reviewers tell it rougher. A one-star May review titled "Used to be the Gold Standard 5-Star App; Now Unusable" reports a broken histogram and clipping alerts on every adjustment since December; others describe export crashes and DJI clips that refuse to render. A late-May update fixed Clarity rendering glitches on RAW exports, so the regressions are getting chased, but a rebuilt engine has to re-earn the trust the old one had banked.
What works
- Subject and Background masks in one tap, with per-mask brightness, contrast, and clarity
- Real-time 8K video edits with a live histogram, new in the rebuilt engine
- Curated Community Preset Collections from a 3,500-preset pool
What to know
- Reviewers report histogram and export regressions since the December rebuild
- Reviewers who bought in years ago resent new tools landing behind Darkroom+, a recurring one-star theme in the June 2026 reviews
Fits anyone who wants photo and video grading in one app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and can ride out a mid-rebuild stretch.
PetaPixel flagged one practical wrinkle worth planning around: edits opened in version 7 can render differently than they did before the rebuild, older edits and large files especially. iPhoners still editing on an Intel Mac are out entirely; version 7 dropped Intel support.
Export anything you care about before updating; the insurance costs nothing but storage.
