No doubt some of you will be taking your iPhone with you to the odd party this weekend. Whether it be New Years celebrations tonight, or after parties through the long weekend. And if you’re taking pictures in unfamiliar locations it might be handy to have an app or two for removing Red Eye or Graininess from shots.
We’re checking out Perfect Photo from MacPhun LLC to see if it might fit the billÉ Based on our experience with their Photo Studio app, that we reviewed here a little while ago, we know the UI will be nice and the filters good. So this should be a lock.
As I mentioned when I reviewed Photo Studio, iPhone photo apps are probably the most popular genre of apps. And I have to admit that since upgrading to an iPhone 4 as my day to day phone I am finding the much improved camera (over that in my long suffering iPhone 2G) is an essential tool in my daily life.
Quite often though the photos we take quickly to catch a moment in time are sometimes a bit grainy in low light situations, have some blurring, and even Red Eye now that the iPhone 4 sports a flash. It would only be polite if we tidy up our friend’s appearance before we splash them all over Twitter or Flickr direct from a bar or family gathering this holiday season!
Enter Perfect Photo 2.0 for the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.
The user interface and colour scheme of Perfect Photo matches that of Photo Studio, which is nice if you like a cohesive set of tools on your smart phone, and of course also makes learning to use it a doddle if you have already used an app which works in very much the same way.
Unlike Photo Studio, which is strongly geared towards augmenting your snaps with effects like sepia tone hues or X-ray fun, Perfect Photo uses the same app environment to post-process photos with filters more designed to repair or enhance the basic quality of the image you have managed to snap.
“Effects” in Perfect Photo include simple things like cropping, rotations and alignment. Also staple things like colour balance, brightness / contrast correction and exposure control. On top of those filters there are more complex functions you can use like those to reduce of increase shadows, Graininess, the sharpness of images. Finally you have a range of filters that allow you to “Spot Heal” areas of an image or remove things like “Red Eye”.
There’s not as many options on the filter list to choose from as there is in Photo Studio. But that is kind of the point. This app is about managing and post-processing images so that they are good photos, and not about turning your photos into arty or other worldly concept shots. So it’s a very different tool.
The user interface is smooth to respond, every option sliding a page one way or another to bring in more functionality. And on the most part it all flows and makes sense. There are even nicely presented help screens to guide you through import options and the like.
For some reason however, even on my iPhone 4, there was the occasional delay between pressing any button, and the interface responding. This made me double hit options, or hit the wrong options when I was incorrectly reacting to what I thought the interface would do, only to have it stutter. Why do I labour this point? Well, because in an app so polished it really stands out as a glaring flaw. But it’s not a deal breaker. Just surprising.
All the functionality you expect is there. You can redo and undo effects, and if you want to you can choose a random effect to apply to your image. Although I suspect the latter feature is there more because it’s part of this suite of apps interface framework. Because none of the effects are the kind I’d want to apply randomly to a picture – rather I’d employ them to correct something that is wrong with a photo I have taken – or to enhance something in the image I want to bring out.
All the effects are governed by a global set of parameters which describe the size of image you want to work on. So if you are just producing email thumbnails, or a cool avatar you can downsize larger images. But conversely you can also thrash away on full size HD images with complex effects, and the app makes it very clear that your iPhone or iPod is not a Cray Supercomputer, and some processing may take a while. It’s very clear when processing is going on, and even on high quality pictures I didn’t have a problem with the processing time at all. It’s fairly quick for a smartphone.
Ultimately you can send a processed image just about anywhere, by any service. You know the drill. And the app will walk you through it. You can also import images to the app via iTunes, or even take shots from within the app.
At $0.99 Perfect Photo 2.0 is a quality product, that the developers know will be popular, and have priced very reasonably. And they can afford to because it will sell in large numbers.
If you already have one of MacPhun’s photo apps then you know they do what they say on the box. And if you don’t then we can recommend them as being well worth the money, professionally produced and very complete. The developers also continually strive to improve their apps after release as is borne out by this being a v2.0 app already, and being significantly improved over the original.
If you are out and about snapping shots this weekend, or anytime in 2011 this is an app worth having on your iOS device.
$0.99 (View in iTunes)
Category: Utilities
Updated: Nov 30, 2010
Current Version: 2.0.0
2.0.0 (iOS 4.0 Tested)
11.9 MB
Language: English
Seller: macphun.com, LLC
© 2009-2010 MacPhun LLC
Rated 4+
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 3.0 or later
When one normally envisages photoshop style effects and the workflow associated with them it generally revolves around the entire image, or a selection we have made with a simple rectangle or “lasso” tool.
TouchUp for iPad lets us use our fingers to paint effects on, or off of our images and photos, as well as layer further effects over one another. So how did we find the concept in every day use?
TouchUp is a well presented app. The people at RogueSheep have a relatively short history in apps. But then so do most software houses. In that time they have managed to put out apps of a definitive quality. TouchUp for iPad is no exception. RogueSheep have also won few awards. So we should be in good hands.
The main desktop of the app is rather hokey for my tastes, but works well. You can tap little photos of effects areas, or work areas, or your gallery to manipulate your workflow and import and export images.
The workspace when editing an image is clean and tidy, and best of all makes sense.
When you are done editing there are all the usual options for Twitter, Facebook or email to share your work. You can also import images from flikr to work on initially, as well as from your own photo library.
One of the things I really like about the app is that you can very easily recreate those trendy black and white shots with key objects colorized. In one of their tutorial videos on their web site RogueSheep illustrate this by painting color back into a street shot that has been made black and white, so that the traffic lights end up being the only coloured object in the picture.
But your creativity can go much further than that. Base effects included in TouchUp are as follows : Black and White, Sepia, Blur, Contrast, Brightness, Temperature, Saturation, Tint, Hue Shift, Color Paint Brush, Tint Paint Brush. And as I’ve already said you can layer and combine those.
It needn’t end there either, as Rogue Sheep offer more effects online as downloadable options. For cash, of course! But some of those are quite nifty. Like Dodge and Burn for $1.99.
How you combine and use those effects is up to you. And at any point you can go back and forth between the various layers of effects you have painted on your image, and tweak settings.
All the menus are easy to understand iPad OS popups that allow you to scroll though options, expand settings areas and twiddle widgets to get just the hue, brightness or strength you want to give an effect.
One niggle I had was that there are no controls for cropping or rotating your images. So you may need to use another app to get your photo prepared for TouchUp. By version 4.0, which is where TouchUp for iPad is right now, I would have expected that option to be in there. Perhaps in version 5.0?
Right now TouchUp is $2.99. And at that price I’d say it is money well spent.
$2.99 (View in iTunes)
Category: Photography
Updated: Oct 30, 2010
Current Version: 4
4
24.3 MB
Language: English
Seller: RogueSheep
© 2010 RogueSheep Incorporated
Rated 4+
Requirements:Compatible with iPad. Requires iOS 3.2 or later
iPhone photo apps are probably the most popular genre of apps, if my social circle on Twitter is anything to go by. And I have to admit that since upgrading to an iPhone 4 as my day to day phone I am finding the much improved camera (over that in my long suffering iPhone 2G) is an essential tool in my daily life. I can actually take photos of documents (which people can read), and small intricate things I want to email to someone quickly for an opinion. But I can also take some rather nice HDR photos of moments in everyday life I come across, confident in the knowledge that the iPhone’s camera will almost always capture the detail I want.
But the photos I take, overall, are still a little bit flat. I don’t have a snap on lens with filters for my iPhone 4, although I know a girl who does. And often times it’s not so easy, when capturing quick shots of things that take your fancy, to get the lighting right, or catch the mood you wanted. So what we need is some post processing…
Enter FX Photo Studio 3.0 for the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad…
FX Photo Studio 3.0 (which is a bit of a mouthful so I’ll just call it Photo Studio from now on) has been around for a while, and has been updated frequently. It boasts the “most high quality photo effects and filters on the App Store”. I don’t dispute it! And the app is certainly well put together.
Here is some of their own blurb about the kind of effects in the app..
FX Photo Studio 3.0 features three new categories: Groovy Lo-Fi (with effects simulating analog photos from 70s, 80s, and 90s), Grunge (such effects as Grunge Rays, Stencil Graffiti, etc.), SFX (such effects as X-ray and Night Vision Cam); old categories have also been updated with new effects. Three more categories – Color Lenses, Color Strokes, and Hollywood FX – are available as in-aps and include 33 more effects, raising a total amount to 204 high quality effects and filters.
There’s a lot to choose from, and even the downloadable content, which they don’t bug you about in the app (unless you ask) looks good too. These guys have been doing this for a while, relatively, and it shows.
The splash screen is really pretty, and I loved the little reflection of a view from the front camera on my iPhone 4, in a lens in the centre of a flower of multi-colour petals. I could have played with that for a while, all by itself, if I didn’t have to check the rest of the app out!
The user interface is smooth to respond, every option sliding a page one way or another to bring in more functionality. And on the most part it all flows and makes sense. For some reason, even on my iPhone 4, there was the occasional delay between pressing any button, and the interface responding. This made me double hit options, or hit the wrong options when I was incorrectly reacting to what I thought the interface would do, only to have it stutter. Why do I labour this point? Well, because in an app so polished it really stands out as a glaring flaw. But it’s not a deal breaker. Just surprising.
The choice of colour, style of the informational popups, and scrolling of menus of filters and effects are all superb. Taking a photo, or pulling one in from your photo library is seamless and easy to do. And the whole time with the constant theme throughout, even down to camera control options, you feel like you are in a stylish, cohesive pro app. And that helps make you feel creative. I found the entire experience in this app more fulfilling (and less frustrating) than in Apple’s own iMovie for iPhone, to give you some comparison.
Choosing effects is made easy with lots of options. You can just roll a dice, almost literally, by hitting a dice button to pass your image through a random filter. Or you can scroll through a very smooth and responsive (I knew they could do it – so why not elsewhere in the app?) illustrated column of effects, with a brief description and a sample image for each. Or you can step through each effect one by one. It is also possible to layer effects, so once you’ve processed an image, you can overlay another effect, and another, and so on.
I didn’t find any undo options. But this is not a huge issue, as you are working on an independent copy from your original image. But undoing the last effect would be a nice feature, even though I acknowledge you also have previews to make decisions based on.
Some effects relay on your image being a certain orientation, and the tools are there to manipulate that too. Although when a picture is landscape, and when it is not is not clear in iOS, or this app. But that is not Photo Studios fault! And you soon figure it out. Do any of you guys or girls out there find yourself fighting with auto-rotate on images, when going between landscape and portrait on the device? Or is it just me?
You can also crop and resize images, and so forth.
All the effects are governed by a global set of parameters which describe the size of image you want to work on. So if you are just producing email thumbnails, or a cool avatar you can downsize larger images. But conversely you can also thrash away on full size HD images with complex effects, and the app makes it very clear that your iPhone or iPod is not a Cray Supercomputer, and some processing may take a while. It’s very clear when processing is going on, and even on high quality pictures I didn’t have a problem with the processing time at all. It’s fairly quick for a smartphone.
The range of effects is diverse, and they are all of good quality. Some are a bit kitsch, so Facebook people will like those, and others are quite arty. But they are all customisable real time on a copy of the image you are working on. So the level of the effect can be varied, as well as other parameters which are effect specific. You can see the changes previewed in real time, as I mentioned before. After that you commit the image to be processed and wait short while.
Ultimately you can send the image just about anywhere, by any service. You know the drill. And the app will walk you through it.
At around $2.00, depending on your exchange rate, Photo Studio 3.0 is a quality product, that the developers know will be popular, and have priced very reasonably. And they can afford to because it will sell in large numbers.
If you want to sepia tone your iPhone shots, add fire or rain, a skull, love hearts, or simply affect the hue and tone to enhance a sunset in a panorama, Photo Studio can do all that.
If you are an iPhone Camera enthusiast FX Photo Studio is a must have app.
$2.99 (View in iTunes)
Category: Photography
Updated: Nov 09, 2010
Current Version: 3.0.0
3.0.0 (iOS 4.0 Tested)
34.6 MB
Language: English
Seller: macphun.com, LLC
© 2009-2010 MacPhun LLC
Rated 4+
Requirements:Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 3.0 or later