> Test 1 Adjustments
Tone, color, sharpening, and presets
A big advance in digital photography has been shooting raw images, meaning all the data from the camera’s sensor is stored without being pre–processed. This leaves you more scope to adjust exposure or color balance, or bring detail out of shadows or highlights. iPad Pros and iPhones since the 6s or SE can shoot raw with third–party apps (though not the default Camera app), and you can import raw images from a camera or sync them from your Mac.
In Snapseed and Affinity Photo, opening a raw image invites you to adjust it in Develop mode, but you can switch in and out of this at will. In the other apps, raw photos open as normal but respond accordingly. Darkroom wasn’t the best at exploiting the extra latitude; some adjustments didn’t work as expected, and sharpening was barely visible. Pixelmator Photo has proper sharpen options and makes good use of the available tonal range. Lightroom is the gold standard here, with pro adjustments, controllable sharpening and noise reduction, and Clarity and Dehaze to make detail pop. It also has the best tools for straightening. Affinity Photo’s features are more comprehensive, but less focused.
Manual tone and color adjustment is adequate in all the apps. Pixelmator Photo has pro color options such as three–way split toning (shadows, midtones and highlights). Like Affinity Photo, it shows a histogram at the top of its adjustments panel; in Lightroom it’s an optional overlay. Darkroom offers RGB curves and selective color, but with limited flexibility.
Snapseed, the only app to apply all edits irreversibly (except for Undo), has a more primitive interface which at least gets out of the way while you drag left or right on the image to adjust. Affinity Photo offers the broadest features, with a live split–screen preview.
Snapseed’s preset filters gave us attractive results, feeling more purposeful than those in Darkroom and Pixelmator Photo. Affinity Photo has plenty of filters, plus brushed effects and more. Lightroom has a few presets, but not a lot to play with.
with Raw images, data fRom the cameRa’s sensoR is stoRed without being pRe–pRocessed