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A local adjustment ran as a second chain after every global operation, then blended by the mask. So global contrast -30 with -20 on a face was contrast -30, the rest of the chain, and contrast -20 again on the result, rather than -50 where contrast runs. The two edits compounded in ways neither slider showed; a flattening applied to an already flattened picture is how the shadows of a night shot went magenta. A layer's setting is now an offset from its default, added to the global setting (clamped to the parameter's range; a moved switch or choice replaces it) and run at that operation's own place in the chain. At each operation the global fragment and each touching layer's combined fragment read the same input colour, and the pixel moves by each layer's weighted difference: c_g + sum w_i (c_i - c_g). At full weight that is the combined setting exactly, at zero the global result exactly, and no setting is applied twice. An offset that brings an operation back to neutral emits an empty version, which undoes the global setting inside the mask. Blending the colours rather than the uniforms is deliberate: the tone curve and colour mixer emit code only for the channels and bands that are touched, so the global and combined versions of one operation need not share a uniform set. A photograph with no masks compiles to the same shader byte for byte. Test: global -30 with a whole-frame layer at -20 renders within one count of global -50.
DarkRoom
A non-destructive RAW photo editor and library for Linux and Android, with a GPU develop pipeline, a catalog that syncs between devices, and no account, no telemetry and no cloud of its own.
The manual shows every feature, pictured from the application itself. This page says what it is, how to get it, and what is still missing.
What it does
A library. Point it at a folder — on this machine, on a network mount, or one a Nextcloud client keeps in virtual-files mode, where a placeholder is treated as the photograph rather than as a one-byte file — or at a Nextcloud account directly; a photograph that is only on the server opens on its thumbnail with the download's progress over it. The grid is virtualised, ordered by capture time with a timeline beside it, and filtered by rating, flag, colour label, person and whether the file is here. Ratings, colour labels, keywords, collections and a trash that survives a crash mid-operation. Card ingest. Bursts fold. The same RAW catalogued twice — a dated folder and a backup beside it — is found, proved the same, and folded onto one copy with the spares in the trash. Face detection and identity, with the index syncing between devices.
Developing. Eighteen declared operations fused into one compute dispatch, plus the neighbourhood work that cannot be: clarity, texture, capture sharpening, noise reduction, lens correction, spectral film simulation. Crop, straighten and correct converging verticals, spot repair, and local adjustments over masks the model draws — click a subject or a category, then paint, subtract a gradient or keep only where two selections agree, grow or shrink the edge. Focus peaking and a raw histogram for judging what is recoverable. Presets, with a collection shipped in the application — everyday corrections, and a look for each measured colour, cinema and black-and-white stock — and Lightroom presets imported as looks that leave a photograph's own corrections alone. XMP sidecars other editors read.
Panoramas. Select the frames, align, choose a projection, fill the ragged border rather than crop it, and the composite lands beside its sources as a DNG, with a sidecar recording what it was merged from.
From the keyboard, and with its manual. Rating, flagging and labelling
have keys in the grid and in develop, as do zoom, undo and stepping through a
shoot in develop, and none of them is keyboard-only. The help sheet (F1, or
? in develop) lists every key and gesture, generated from the code that
binds it, and links them to the sections of the manual that show them — the
manual ships with the application and opens offline.
Export. JPEG, PNG, AVIF, JPEG XL, 8- and 16-bit TIFF, with resize, output sharpening, a naming template and a colour space — into albums: named export folders on this machine or on the server, never inside the library, which remember the photograph behind each file and sync between devices as collections do.
On both platforms. The same core runs on a desktop and a 12-inch tablet; the interface is one layout, tuned for a wide viewport with touch targets throughout. On both, the develop view draws the compute pass's texture directly — no readback between the GPU and the screen.
Getting it
| Platform | How | State |
|---|---|---|
| Arch Linux | packaging/PKGBUILD — makepkg -si |
Built from every release |
| Android | The APK from each CI run, or ./docker/android/package.sh --install |
Runs on a tablet; F-Droid not yet submitted |
| Windows | DarkRoom-<version>-x86_64-setup.exe, cross-built by CI (windows.md) |
Verified under Wine only; unsigned |
| Flatpak | packaging/flatpak/ |
Manifest in tree; folders are chosen through the portal, but no Flatpak has been built to prove it |
Or build it. Git LFS is required for the model weights, and the toolchain pins itself to 1.92.0:
git lfs install && git lfs pull
cargo run --release -p darkroom-desktop
Android, through the containerised toolchain (docker/android):
./docker/android/build.sh cargo ndk -t arm64-v8a build --release
CONTRIBUTING.md has the system packages, the four commands CI runs against what you send, and the shortest useful contribution — a develop operation is one YAML file, and it arrives with its controls, its place in the chain and its tests.
Where it stands
0.18.0, twenty-six tagged releases in. 192 numbered requirements in scope, 84% of them claimed by code and traced to it; the rest are written down rather than merely absent.
Not built: plugins (post-v1, D12), compare and survey culling, AI denoise, tiled rendering, HDR merge and focus stacking, importing a Lightroom or darktable catalog, translations beyond the launch screen, most of the Android platform integration beyond running, and a Flatpak actually built and run in its sandbox. The performance targets are half verified: the per-commit benchmark suite §8 requires exists for everything that does not need a frame — the catalog, the scan, the thumbnails — and not yet for the render path, so a regression there fails nothing. outstanding.md is the list, with the reasoning for each.
Documentation
docs/README.md is the index. The short version, for someone using it:
| manual | Every feature, pictured |
| gestures.md | How it is driven — generated from the code, so it cannot describe a gesture that does not exist |
For someone changing it:
| CONTRIBUTING.md | How to land a first change without reading the rest |
| requirements.md | What the software must do — the numbered register, and the decisions |
| architecture.md | How it is built — crates, the GPU pipeline, the data model, sync |
| technical-debt.md | Compromises taken deliberately, each with the condition that retires it |
| outstanding.md | What is not built, and whether that is a decision or a gap |
| code-health.md | What a contribution costs, per seam, measured |
| traceability.md | Generated: which requirement is claimed by which file |
Designs, one per subsystem: segmentation and mask editing · spot removal · panorama · faces · inference · storage and sync · catalog · display and extension · navigation · distribution · windows · benchmarks.
Licence
GPL-3.0-or-later. The photographs in the manual and the test fixtures are the author's and are there to show and test this project, nothing else. The model weights carry their own licences — models/LICENCE.md.