Darkroom Photo Editor Version 7 Is Here

credits: Darkroom

Darkroom has rolled out version 7, and it is one of the most substantial updates the app has seen in its decade of existence. The company rebuilt the entire rendering engine to better handle today’s big RAW files, high-resolution photos, and increasingly heavy video formats. The app still looks familiar, but navigation is smoother, edits respond faster, and everything just feels more stable. Darkroom also says that the overhaul isn’t just about fixing current bottlenecks, but meant to set the stage for whatever features they want to build over the next several years.

On the surface, there are a few obvious additions. Two new analog-inspired effects, Bloom and Halation, which bring glow and film-like colour bleed to edges. Video editing gets a noticeable upgrade with smoother scrubbing, cleaner playback, time coded navigation, and a real-time histogram that updates instantly as you adjust footage. Highlight and shadow recovery has been reworked thanks to the move to a linear colour space, giving you more room to pull detail from tricky lighting situations. Viewing controls are more flexible now as well, letting you zoom far beyond the image frame or dive down to pixel level, while previews load at consistently higher quality.

A lot of the improvements show up in everyday use. Sliders behave more responsively, masking feels more precise, and the crop tool now works the same on iOS as it does on macOS. Darkroom also refreshed its app icon and introduced alternate designs for subscribers. One notable change, version 7 drops support for Intel Macs, since the new engine depends on Apple Silicon’s hardware acceleration. The update is free (as is most of the app) and rolling out gradually, though exporting edits that use Bloom or Halation requires a Darkroom+ subscription at $9.99 per month or $39.99 per year.

You can see full details on Darkroom’s website here