When looking for a photo app, I’m not interested in one that let’s you edit or add effects to photos you take. I’d prefer to do that kind of stuff on my PC after transferring the photos. But, of course, I’ve been interested since day one in an app that can actually improve the quality of the pics I take with my iPhone. However, I’ve been very wary of purchasing such an app because there is so much utter crap out there. I think it’s pretty shitty that there are so many worthless apps out there for photographs that sold so incredibly well. I’m speaking mainly about those apps which promise “zoom” but really only enlarge a portion of the original photo and produce awful looking, pixellated pictures. You could do this kind of “zoom” yourself by cropping and enlarging and it’s really not what people are thinking the app will do.
But I actually did find an awesome photo app that really does improve the quality of my pictures. In my view, if you take photos with your iPhone, this app is actually a must. It’s called Darkroom Premium and the main reason I love it so much is that the Steady Mode works very well.
Steady Mode is pretty simple, but it has improved the quality of my pictures a great deal. When you press the shutter button, your iPhone will not immediately take the picture. It uses the motion sensing features of the iPhone to delay the shot until the phone is steady. You might not realize just how much the iPhone usually shakes when taking a photo. But it is a bit tough to hold and isn’t an actual camera. Plus, just pressing the shutter button kind of makes your phone shake a bit. It might just be that I’m not great at holding the camera steady, but I have to be honest - the photos I took in steady mode are just way better.
After shooting in Steady Mode, you also see a bar on the screen which shows you how steady the camera is. As it gets closer to steady the bar fills up. And when it totally fills, the photo is taken. Of course, if you’re like me the bar goes up and then down and then up again. What’s really great is that you can set the sensitivity of Steady Mode from one to ten. This is awesome. When you are in something of a rush and are willing to sacrifice a little quality, you go low. When you have time and really want a great shot, you go high.
As I said, the difference for me is really sweet. What’s more, the more I use it, the better I get at keeping the phone steady. It kinda trains you in that way. This feature alone was totally worth the 99 cents for me. I use it pretty much every time I take a picture now.
My second favorite feature of Darkroom also sounds pretty simple, but is handy in execution. Darkroom makes the whole screen your shutter button. So you don’t have to tap that little camera icon - you just tap anywhere on the screen and you’re good. Like I said, a pretty basic idea. But I think it’s very handy not to have to move your fingers to hit that button while you’re trying to hold the phone a certain way. You can turn this on or off if you want but I don’t know why you would turn it off since it’s quite convenient. I’ve never hit the screen by accident or anything.
A feature I don’t foresee using too much but might be helpful to some is the timer. That’s pretty self-explanatory. You set the timer and the picture is not taken until it runs down. Great for those funky MySpace poses I suppose.
After taking a picture, you have the option to save or delete it right away. You don’t have to do it by going to the iPhone’s photo roll. However, you can turn this feature off and put Darkroom into autosave mode. With this feature on, every photo you take is automatically saved to the photo roll right after you take it. I use autosave because I prefer to go through the photo roll later and then delete the ones I like. Just like in the regular camera app, Darkroom has an icon in the lower left which takes you directly to the photo roll.
Darkroom is very simple to use and the interface is perfectly clear. Of course, there is always a negative. The biggest negative with Darkroom is the amount of time a picture takes to save. When you take a picture with Darkroom it takes significantly longer for it to save than it does with the iPhone’s app. I actually timed it. The regular app takes a little less than 2 seconds to save. Darkroom takes about 9 seconds. That’s with autosave on. The save time is actually a bit shorter with autosave off. It takes a little less than 2 seconds after you take the picture. Then, when you choose to save it, it’s another 5 seconds, for a total of 7 seconds. But of course, in this mode, you have to take the time to push save or discard. My timing may be off a bit and may vary from phone to phone or because of other factors. But it’s definitely an issue and causes me to not use Darkroom when I want to take a bunch of photos one right after the other. I’ve also seen App Store reviews that state Darkroom doesn’t work with the 3.0 update - but I can’t confirm this as I’m waiting to download 3.0 until the first fix is pushed.
Even though the save time is a pain, Darkroom is so great that I can definitely overlook it. I just really love the quality of my iPhone photos. In fact, I didn’t know iPhone photos could be this good before I used Darkroom. It’s a great app that accomplishes it’s purpose of making the camera function of the iPhone better. There’s a free version with limited features if you want to try that. I don’t see why Apple can’t have settings like the steady mode and full-screen shutter included in their own camera app. But until then, Darkroom is the only additional photo app I need. I’m a little confused as to why they went with the name Darkroom, since that implies it’s an app that focuses on post-photo stuff. Be aware that there’s another app called Dark-room with a dash, which is an entirely different app. For 99 cents, I’m very pleased with my purchase of Darkroom Premium.
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