Brightroom is a composable image editor for iOS that uses Core Image and Metal for rendering.
The tool addresses the need for flexible, performant image editing by decoupling the editing engine from the UI layer. Rather than providing a monolithic editor interface, Brightroom exposes an EditingStack—a headless component that manages editing history and rendering—allowing developers to build custom editor UIs by composing smaller, independently testable components. Rendering is backed by Metal for performance and supports P3 Wide Color Gamut. The tool handles demanding use cases like photos up to 12000 pixels and provides built-in capabilities including face detection, custom mask drawing, LUT-based filters, and remote image loading.
Brightroom suits developers building photo editing features who want control over the UI while avoiding the complexity of implementing image processing from scratch. It works with both UIKit and SwiftUI. The project includes a built-in PhotosCropRotating component and a ClassicEditor UI, but its primary strength lies in enabling custom editor designs through composition. An open-source production app called Drip demonstrates the tool in a real App Store application.
The project maintains detailed documentation on Notion and actively solicits contributions from Core Image and Metal professionals. A demo app is included in the repository for experimentation. The codebase underwent a significant restructuring in version 2, including a rename from Pixel to Brightroom and adoption of Verge for state management.
