Darkroom

Darkroom grades photos and video: a warm portrait for a speaker card, a black-and-white treatment for a report cover, the same look across every clip in a reel. It works on your device, and a look can leave as a LUT or travel in a share link.

Grade a photo

Open Darkroom and choose an image. The controls run from broad to fine:

• Develop: Temperature, Tint, Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Saturation, Vibrance and Dehaze.
• Levels & curves, for the whole image or one channel, with Auto levels.
• Colour mix for the hue, saturation and lightness of eight colour bands, Convert to black & white with per-colour mixing and a tint, and colour balance for shadows, midtones and highlights with Preserve luminosity.
• Film look, such as Chrome slide, Teal & orange or Bleach bypass, with Look strength.
• LUT: a built-in preset or your own .cube or .3dl file, with LUT intensity.
• Treatment: Colour wash, Duotone, Gradient map or Split tone, in your design system's colours.
• Texture: Film grain, Vignette, Bloom, Halation, Colour fringing, Sharpen and Dust & scratches. Seed keeps the grain and dust the same on every render.

Before / after split and Histogram help you judge the result. Darkroom also opens Photoshop and GIMP layers for positioning, blending and export.

To keep HDR or wide-gamut originals at full precision, set Editing range to HDR; see Wide colour and HDR editing.

Bring in an Adobe photo preset

Import Adobe photo preset maps an XMP preset's exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, vibrance and dehaze onto Darkroom's own controls. The result is approximate: profiles, Kelvin white balance, masks and settings Darkroom has no control for are listed in a report. Settings the preset does not mention keep their current values. Lua .lrtemplate files are refused, so export XMP from Adobe first.

The CLI returns the same controls and a Darkroom link:

lolly adobe preset look.xmp

Reuse a look

• Download look as .cube bakes the current grade into a LUT (choose its size under Baked LUT size) for use in another app. A built-in LUT preset can be downloaded on its own too.
• Grade a video applies the same colour look to every frame of a clip, at its detected rate from 1 to 60 fps; variable-rate input becomes fixed-rate output. Grading keeps a loop's matching seam but cannot repair a cut in the source. Leave moving grain off when the first and last frames must match exactly.
• Save the session as a user template, a starting point for the next grade.

The Motion looks templates are starting points for looping clips, each with moving grain off: Warm editorial (soft highlights and warm colour), Clean colour (a small contrast lift for product clips) and Editorial mono (black and white with open shadows). Export a still or a LUT, or grade a finished loop.

A Darkroom share link can also go straight into Design: the Photo title motion starter there takes your upload or an edited Darkroom link (see Animating).

Export

Darkroom exports PNG, JPG, WebP, AVIF, TIFF, PDF, SVG and Penpot for stills, MP4 and WebM for video, and OpenEXR and Radiance for high-dynamic-range masters. Export a file covers formats, sizes and what travels with each file.