APPLE DESIGN AWARDS
A Light in the Darkroom
Darkroom: Photo & Video Editor
Pro Editing, AI&Preset Filters
When Majd Taby began developing his photo-editing app Darkroom back in 2015, he and his team had a simple mantra: “Make photo editing as easy as photo browsing.” But it took a few years—and a life-changing trip—to truly make it happen.
Today, the app is not only an Apple Design Award winner but also one of the most powerful and intuitive photo and video editors on the store.
“Casual users need something that gets them from point A to point B,” Taby says. “Professional users care about power and speed; they want to do crazy stuff with as little effort as possible. So the first question we asked ourselves was: ‘Can we make power-user features so easy that they become accessible to the casual user?’”
Most photo-editing apps, he’d noticed, focused on a single utility: adding a border, removing unwanted objects, or spot-cropping images for social media. That meant an awful lot of opening and importing, and photos scattered across multiple screens. He envisioned an app that put everything—curves and color correction as well as spiffy tricks like customizable filters—in one place.
“We wanted to march in lockstep with the iPhone ecosystem, to be a model citizen of what it was capable of producing,” he says.
For instance, Darkroom integrates with the existing Photos app. “With other apps, you’re forced to import photos from your library into theirs,” he says, which results in a “shadow library” you have to manage separately. The app also had to be “finger-friendly”—usable with one hand, without complicated finger gestures. The team mercilessly excised extra taps wherever they found them.
Darkroom launched in 2015—around the time the Syrian refugee crisis was dominating the news. Taby, who was born and raised in Syria, paused work on the app to document the situation with a photographer. The resulting book, Displaced: Stories from the Syrian Diaspora, published in 2017, helped raise money for the Lebanese Red Cross.
“We spent 10 weeks documenting the crisis, and I’d realized something,” he says. “If you’ve never done gardening and you try to build a gardening app, you’re not going to get it right.” The trip, he says, was not only personally meaningful but also an opportunity for field research for Darkroom.
Once he was back, upgrades to the app came fast and furious. “When we launched we only had curves,” says Taby. “By the second version, we had a selective color-adjustment tool. Apple added RAW-editing support in 2016, and we were one of the first apps to support that.”
With iPadOS, Darkroom truly became a “serious professional-grade photo-editing tool for anyone doing mobile or DSLR photography,” says Taby. Darkroom now supports video editing, drag-and-drop, Siri Shortcuts, widgets, extensions, and more.
“We’re doing as much as possible to make something seem fast,” he says, “when behind the scenes there’s an enormous amount of stuff happening.”