Of all the photo-editing apps that have graced the App Store, few have held their own enough to warrant their place on our iPhone’s Home screen. Editing app Darkroom, with its streamlined UI, ever-expanding feature set, and truly useful capabilities does more than justify its inclusion. On its surface, it’s another editing app that lets you apply filters to your shots. If you described it that way to your friends, you wouldn’t be wrong. But you’d be vastly underselling it.

The filter library is expansive, with more than 50 default filters built in. But you can also create your own by manually tinkering with the shot as well. Make adjustments that look great and save it as a new filter. This makes it easy to edit one, two, or a hundred shots automatically. Speaking of manual adjustments, Darkroom has a huge array of tweaks to apply as well as access to curves and colors.

For those who are regular Instagram publishers — and even those who aren’t — the frame tool is very useful. Choose from a huge array of frame colors, inset width, and aspect ratio of the finished product. Perfect for publishing on social, or printing. Outside of frames, there is a useful crop tool that is also able to compensate for skewed shots.

Users have flocked to Apple’s portrait effect on iPhone, and Darkroom allows you to elevate those already-stunning shots. When editing a portrait-style photo that has the depth effect, you can apply different edits to the foreground separate from the background. Lighten up the subject, dim the background, and even control how much blur is in the background of the shot.

After the nonstop cavalcade of updates that have hit Darkroom, it’s no longer even accurate to call it just a photo editor. It is now a fully-featured editor that works for both photos as well as video. That’s right, much of the features also apply to videos. You can crop, add a frame, tweak the various adjustments, mess with curves, and apply filters to any video you’ve shot.

All of this only begins to describe the genius that is Darkroom. We could keep you here all day talking about histograms, accessing metadata, going through history, exporting projects, keyboard shortcuts, iPad multitasking, RAW support, and more. Instead of that, go download Darkroom on the App Store for free. You can use the photo editor and other features before having to shill out $3.99/month or $19.99/year cost to unlock the full app. Trust us — and the near 16,000 others who’ve left it an average 4.8 stars, Darkroom is one of the best photo and video editors for iPhone and iPad.

But enough about other people's apps.

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