I love editing in Lightroom, and occasionally Photoshop. They're my first port of call, and probably always will be. But that's just where I start. I feel like my best work isn't finished until I've brought it through the Darkroom process. I have my own presets that I work from and I love them. The only criticism I have is around pasting edits - I have my presets set to, say. 42 percent opacity, but when I apply the filter, the opacity is defaulted to 100 percent. I have to manually adjust the opacity in at least one image before copying and pasting the preset onto my gallery. Outside of this minor annoyance, I love the ability to create my own "film," so I continue to use the app regularly.

I was really hopeful that Darkroom would be the right application for me to finally get off of my dependence on Lightroom for photo editing, but over the course of the past year that I have been trying to integrate this app into my workflow, I have been stopped by the clunkiness of the application and the sheer amount of bugs that exist in the editor. Just today I attempted to crop my a photo, and not a single one of the built-in aspect ratio’s worked properly. It just went between 2:1 and 3:2 no matter what I selected. Edits do not sync properly and more often than not, when applying saved presets to a photo I have to apply the preset multiple times before the white balance and additional settings can be properly applied. This app has great potential, but it just isn’t there. I WANT to never have to open an Adobe app again, but right now I can’t do that.

I've been a Darkroom user since the early days. It has really come along way and is an incredible tool in its current iteration! I think a ton of users will be stoked on it just the way it is. I am a working professional a still need to see a few improvements to really be able to embrace it.1. It still tends to be buggy.2. On my Mac the displayed image while editing is a bit blurry. When you zoom in the image clears up....but their default editing image is not sharp.3. The presets are almost all a bit too extreme for actual work...(I have to back them down to about 50% for them to become usable.) It would be nice to see some more subtle presets.4. The Smart Masks are great! But we need to be able to use them on non-portrait and ProRaw images.My main overall issue, is that I know bringing an image into Darkroom is going to equate to a bit of work to get my final edit the way I want. I know that I can go into Lightroom and have what I want in a few clicks...I can't say the same for Darkroom.I love Darkroom. I love what they're doing. and I really feel like they are close to something revolutionary....and theyre getting closer and closer. I'm rooting for Darkroom. I'm a big fan. Download it!!

Darkroom is the best balance of accessibility and depth of features that I've been able to find. The recent flag/reject workflow was a great addition that has made it easier to narrow down which pictures to focus on editing. The filters are my favorite that I've found in any app (looking at you Instagram/VSCO). I'm not a professional, so I always feel like I owe the Darkroom devs credit when I end up with a great picture in the end.The only thing I frequently have to jump into another app for is retouch/repair. But that's a quick hop into PIxelmator Pro and then back into Darkroom for everything else.

Really looking for an app for culling my Photos library on my mac. I use Lightroom for culling photoshoots and love that I can use those same flag/reject options in Darkroom for culling my iphone photos. However... Photos library allows me to filter just videos or just photos, and that is a feature that is lacking in Darkroom. When culling, I want to be able to do all photos or all videos, not just raw photos OR live photos OR portrait photos. Definitely an area of opportunity. Would also love to have a less expensive option to use the app for just culling. I have no intention of using it for editing and can't see spending that kind of money for just culling. I could see this being very helpful for culling but overall, it just doesn't quite meet the mark for me.

Apple released iOS 18, and basically broke the native Photos app on the iPhone. Reversed the sort order (dumb), put a little Insta Reel that nobody asked for at the top of every album. Basically a UX cluster. Not at all the way anyone actually uses photos (which is task-oriented, not for idle entertainment). I was sad for a couple of days, then I remembered… DARKROOM! Much to my glee, Darkroom on iOS behaves exactly the way I wish Photos on iOS did. Focused. No frippery. Presets! Then I wondered… does Darkroom finally have a Mac app? (Quick search.) Why, yes, they do! As a 25-year user of Photoshop, I can honestly say that Darkroom does 95% of what I needed Photoshop to do. Darkroom is the BEST!

Simple, unified interface, integrated functionality and growing features...and it keeps getting better. Love it. Latest updates bring Masking capbility...which i love with the AI-enabled foreground/background and subject selection. That's sweet. I hope it can be enhanced to enable mask painting soon... also hoping to have the ability to build hdr images from raw photos soon. It always gets my 5 stars so i hope this will be the trend. This is one App i've never regretted buying.

But I've been burned so often than I can't bring myself to purchase it. I mean, there is no way I would ever pay a subscription for a photo editor. The only reason most of us are looking for alternatives is to get away from the Creative "Cloud" subscription model.So just pay $75 for the "forever" version, right?Sure, but I've been there and done that. I've seen this movie before. More times than I care to count. I know how it ends. I come pre-abused. As soon as I plunk down seventy five bucks, this is exactly what will happen:• The next week they will update it to a free, ad-supported product, meaning I paid $75 for ad-riddled software, or I guess they'll let me keep my now-unsupported "lifetime" app. For awhile at least.• I'll decline to "upgrade", and every time I open the "old" $75 app, it will bombard me with ads about how I'm missing out and I should upgrade to the free version.* New features and bug-fixes will be for the free version only, and bug reports will get me an email in return telling me that it's fixed, if I only I would stop being so stubborn and selfish and download the new, free version.If by some miracle #1 and #2 don't happen right away, and I actually get to use the sortware (which they will remind me repeatedly that I do not own, only license, and therefore have no rights to) ... then sometime around year #2 I will start gettnig increasingly-desperate pop-ups explaining to me that the software developers cannot possibly survive on my "lifetime" payment, and they'll try to guilt me with all the "Free" bug fixes I got over the last two years. Oh, and about the "Lifetime" thing .... c'mon, I didn't really believe that did I? After all, nothing last forever.THEN #1 or #2 will happen.So as much as I like the software, I'm just going to spare myself the inevitable. Even the least brilliant among us learn eventually.Best of luck.

I hope the devs get back to me on this, but I have used this app for almost a year, and I have many issues with it. First of all, it feels scammy because I was offered a free trial, and after the trial, even though I canceled, it charged me for a year. I wasn’t able to get a refund either. There is hardly a time that I use the app where I don’t run into an issue. To give two examples, for no reason, many times the edited photo would become completely changed, like the saturation and exposure going all the way up for no reason when I try to crop the image. The photo is also always low resolution unless I zoom in, but I want to always see the full photo. I have recordings of the issue if the devs want to see, so I hope we can discuss this further.

No tethered shooting, crop/flip/straighten is VERY glitchy - often shifting/flipping/rotating in unwanted ways when I make some other adjustments, there is no magnified view to make cropping more precise, no distortion correction for barrel/pincushion, zoom view is very glitchy and often turns totally white, sometimes unable to drag image while zoomed in, and although it is nice to be able to make my custom presets the I go to adjust/fix the crop it often jumps to my other preset edit which is bonkers, but I still paid for this app because it is lesser evil than Adobe

I have been using the free version of Darkroom on my phone then I had a large project come up that required me to have an editing app. This one was best because I can apply edits to several pictures and it is easy to use. I downloaded it on my mac and it started crashing but I thought it was because I did not update. I updated then I paid the $75 to have the subscription but I cant even use the app. I just removed it then redownloaded it to see if that would help but when I opened it again it immediately crashed. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this app even though I love it because I simply cannot use it.

Got this because my old favorite photo editor made all the best features paid only. I might have to go back because this doesn't actually offer anything more, (at least for the free version), and because it crashes all the time. It's incredibly slow, I can't import more than 4 photos at a time without it going completely unresponsive. Sometimes in the middle of editing, it just completely stops working and takes a few minutes to suddently start again. I have to export one photo at a time to keep it from crashing again. I've updated it, updated my computer, closed all other apps when its running--nothing works. Would not recommend.