Photo apps for the iPhone and iPod touch don’t really have much to do with anything you usually find around here, so if you want to leave now, I’ll understand.
Photo apps are fun to mess with and some of them are actually quite good, considering the platform. Nearly all of these apps allow you to snap a shot within the app and save it or import one from your Camera Roll. You can then manipulate the image in a variety of ways: resize or crop; lay on filters; add painterly effects, composite; selectively add or remove color; add text; paint over images and so on. I will sometimes use apps in combination, say, crop in one app, and then colorize in another (save the manipulated image from app A to your Camera Roll and import it into app B).
I’ve looked at a bunch of photo apps and here are my top 12 picks (one tie) in random order:
You won’t confuse Omer Shoor’s Photogene with Adobe Photoshop, but it’s fun. You can sharpen, crop, correct color and temperature, rotate, flip and straighten tilted images. It also has several special effects: frames, word bubbles, sepia and heat map (like a thermal image) color. $2.99
The Tiffen Company’s Photo fx is a set of digital optical filters (filters are Tiffen’s main line of business) that simulate a variety of filters and lab processes when taking photographs with film. Photo fx features 26 filters that turn day into night, boost contrast, vignette, glow, halo, pencil, infrared and so on. It’s the most capable of the “add-filter” apps. $2.99
Hendrik Kueck”s ColorSplash, recently broke into the best-selling ranks–of all apps– in the App Store. It’s an image-manipulation app that enables you to convert your color photos into black and white and then restore the color to objects you would like to highlight. The effect is called a “cutout” or “selective desaturation,” in the lingo of digital imaging editing pros. $1.99
Kueck’s Juxtaposer is one of two apps that I like that enable you to composite images. Take any element from one image and add it to another. Zoom in on image one, select the area you want to cut out, then move to the next image and create your composite. Juxtaposer has brushes for blends and manipulate your image in other ways. $1.99
Although though it’s not as flexible as Juxtaposer, Widgetize’s FantasyLens, is simple to use and great fun. You can create composite photos using portraits of friends, family, whomever and one the 24 images or photo templates the app includes. There’s a pretty good variety: Mona Lisa, sunflower, “Tyme” magazine cover, and an goofy face reminiscent of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Newman. $1.99
It’s a toss-up between Pangea’s PangeaVR and Greg Pascale’s iSynth. Both are viewers that enable you to take virtual walking tours through 3-D worlds. Each is designed to download and view panoramas–photos taken in 360 degrees and seamlessly stitched together. PangeaVR accesses panoramas, sorted into portfolios at Pangea’s Web site or your own site. That one is free. There’s a Pro version aimed at photographers who want to download and store their portfolios on their devices. iSynth is a photo viewer for Microsoft’s Photosynth site. That one is free too. Both these apps are similar. The difference is the content on each Web site.
I recently reviewed Tiny Pictures’ Radar|Radar.net photo-sharing app and liked it quite a bit. Radar is a popular service for real-time sharing of pictures and videos. You can upload your pictures to Radar and share them with friends on other social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and most recently, Flickr. The service operates much in the same way as any social networking service whether you share pictures, videos or conversation. You can set up a public profile, limit access to your images, comment privately—that sort of thing. The service and the are free.
The rumor is that the next version of the iPhone (and maybe the iPod touch) will be able to record video. For the rest of us, the closest we’re going to get is Tomohiko Okita’s ReplayCam 25shot! The app takes a succession of up to 25 images at 0.1 to 3.0 second intervals and plays them back. It’s more like a flipbook than a video but it’s yet another way to explore your photographic creativity. $0.99.
Sunray Networks’s AtHome Camera is one of a few Web cam apps in the App Store that enables you to see what’s happening anywhere you have Web cams (up to four) on your iPhone or iPod touch. The app streams live video from your Webcam to your iPhone via Wi-Fi, 3G and EDGE. The first thing you need do is download and install AvsServer from the Sunray’s Web Site. The server software does the work of finding your desktop’s IP address and selecting the port to use. What’s more, you can trigger AtHome Camera to start recording in MPEG-4 format and save the video on your desktop and stream the recorded video to your device. You can also preset AtHome Camera to record and playback at two different intervals, remotely control the Web cam’s frames per second, video quality and image size. $3.99. The server software is free.
If you would you like to add a painterly effect to your photos take a look at MacPhun’s ArtCamera. The app applies filters to your photos that imitate the styles of famous artists such as Warhol, Picasso and Monet. You might have to experiment quite a bit with different photo and filter combinations before something develops that you really like. ArtCamera has 25 filters but what I like about this one is you can choose from resolutions of 320 pixels wide to 1600 pixels wide. An image at 320 pixels takes as little as 10 seconds to render; an image at 1600 pixels takes several minutes. A resolution of 800 pixels is most balanced between time and quality. The higher the resolution, the more likely the app will crash because you’re really pushing the limits of your iPhone. $0.99
CameraBag, from Nevercenter, has been a long-time best-seller in the App Store. You can use the app to make them appear though they were taken by one of 10 cameras: instant Polaroids, fisheye lens, 1974 (your father’s camera) and others. $2.99
