Apple / photo_and_video / DARKROOM: PHOTO & VIDEO EDITOR
REVIEW
Darkroom is the iPhone photo editor that respects the photo.
Bergen Co's indie editor stayed non-destructive, kept RAW handling honest, and charges a subscription you can actually walk away from.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 5 MIN READ
Darkroom: Photo & Video Editor
BERGEN CO.
OUR SCORE
8.7
APPLE
★ 4.8
PRICE
Free
Most iPhone photo editors flatten your image the second you tap export. Darkroom doesn’t. Bergen Co’s editor — built by a small team in Oslo and shipping continuous updates since 2015 — treats the original file as sacred and the edit as a recipe. Close the app, open it next year, and the slider stack is still there, ready to be tweaked, copied to another photo, or reset to zero.
That single design choice is why working photographers keep coming back to it even after Lightroom mobile went free and VSCO leaned harder into filters. Darkroom is what’s left when you strip a desktop-class colour pipeline down to a touchscreen without sanding off the precision. The subscription is fair, the lifetime tier still exists, and the app has never once tried to become a social network.
Darkroom treats the original file as sacred and the edit as a recipe — close the app, open it next year, and the slider stack is still there.
FEATURES
Darkroom edits live on top of the original file. Every slider, curve, and crop is stored as a non-destructive edit stack you can copy, paste, and reset months later without ever flattening the source. The library reads straight from Apple Photos — no separate import step, no second catalogue to maintain — and writes back as either a flattened export or an HEIC sidecar.
RAW handling is the part that earns the reputation. Darkroom decodes ProRAW from recent iPhones, DNG from third-party cameras, and Apple's compressed RAW format with proper highlight recovery and per-channel curves. The colour tools — HSL, tone curves, split toning, and a colour-mixer that targets specific hues — work the way they do on desktop, with finger-friendly hit targets instead of mouse-sized affordances.
Video editing landed in version 5 with the same non-destructive model. Trim, colour-grade, and apply LUTs to clips up to 4K HDR; export keeps Dolby Vision metadata where the source had it. Frames, batch editing, custom filter recipes, a Files-based browser for non-Photos sources, and Apple Pencil hover support on iPad round out the kit.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The non-destructive model is the whole pitch and Darkroom delivers it without asterisks. Edits travel with the photo via iCloud Photos sync, recipes apply across hundreds of images in batch, and a single tap reverts to the original at any point. There is no "catalogue corruption" failure mode because there is no catalogue.
Pricing is the second thing Darkroom gets right. Plus at $19.99 a year unlocks the curves, HSL, and most filters; Pro at $49.99 a year adds video, every export option, and the full RAW pipeline. A one-time $89.99 lifetime tier is still on the menu for anyone allergic to subscriptions — vanishingly rare in the category. Cancel and your existing edits keep rendering; you just lose the Pro tools going forward.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Healing and object removal are the visible gap. Darkroom shipped a basic clone-stamp brush but nothing approaching Lightroom's generative remove or Snapseed's free healing tool, and small distractions still send you to a second app. Masking is layer-based and capable, but the AI subject and sky detection lag what Adobe ships on the same iPhone.
The library tab can crawl on first launch against a 50,000-photo iCloud library — a known cold-start issue that resolves once thumbnails cache. There is also no Android, Windows, or web client, and Bergen Co has been consistent that there won't be. If you carry an iPhone and edit on a Mac, that's a feature; if you collaborate with anyone on Pixel or Galaxy, it's a wall.
CONCLUSION
Darkroom is what you install when you want the photo back without renting Adobe's tax. The non-destructive stack, the RAW pipeline, and the one-time purchase option together make it the most honest paid photo editor on iOS in 2026. Watch for the healing tools to catch up over the next year — that's the one thing keeping it out of Editor's Pick territory.