Category: iOS & Mac reviews

So there’s now millions of iPhones in the wild and a lot of people are taking photos with them. According to stats that I checked just moments ago there’s over 14 million iPhone photos and over 113,000 iPhone 3GS photos on Flickr. I guess they don’t differentiate between the original iPhone and the 3G as the camera didn’t change, but the 3GS gets its own category since the sensor was upgraded. Interestingly I took a screengrab of the same statistics on Tuesday the 29th of September (almost a week ago) and there were 76,000 3GS images, so that’s a 50% increase in 6 days, which seems odd assuming Flickr’s stat machine isn’t on the blink.

Obviously there’s nothing new in taking photos on a phone and other phones have many millions of photos on Flickr, but my point is that the relatively poor technical spec of the iPhone camera doesn’t make it any less popular amongst its users.

The wealth of photography apps on the Store offer a huge variety of options to the experience of taking a photo. There’s a lot of repetition though, and plenty of trash, so I’ve only ever gone for apps that were either considered the best or which appealed in some other way, such as the interface. Whatever you can think of, by this point there is almost certainly “an app for that” (grr). I’ve just had a clear-out and the core bunch that will never leave are CameraBag, QuadCamera, ToyCamera and Tiltshift Generator. I’ll look at those four today, and they’re really fantastic if you’ve not heard of them.

Three others I use a lot, not covered in this post but perhaps later, are Pano, Polarize and Snapbox. Pano and Polarize are another two keepers and I heard that the latter is about to get a big update which will hopefully fix some long-standing issues with the once-dormant app. Snapbox is one I toy with now and again but is by the same developer as Polarise so worth a mention alongside it.

I also hang on to Photogene and Best Camera. I find these apps perfectly adequate but if it wasn’t for a couple of particularly cool or useful things they did I wouldn’t miss them if I deleted them. Still, worth a look!

Finally I also have a couple of photo-related apps, Tumblr and Pixelpipe, that don’t actually process shots but are my go-to guys for uploading to blogs or Flickr, as well as another app called DropBox that I’ve been using a lot of recently for syncing iPhone photos (amongst other things) across my devices.

So I’m going to go through each one and give it a mini-review with as many screenshots as possible to let you make an informed decision about going on an App Store spending spree.

CameraBag

Website / App Store

I think this was possibly the first camera app I got on my iPhone, and it’s still easily my most used, I absolutely love it. It has 10 filters built in although two of them are a bit crap really, as you’ll see below. You load a photo by selecting it from your library or taking a new one within the app, then choose a filter to apply by swiping left or right through them. It shows you the effect and when you’re happy you save the image. There’s also a drop down menu for going directly to a filter.

Guess which two filters I’ve removed from the ‘swipe’ list? Yep, Infrared and Fisheye. Still, valiant attempt to diversify but I think they’re a bit naff. The 1964 option is a little harsh as well, creating blown highlights and huge areas of pure black, but it’s worth keeping active as it does suit some photos.

Also, I’ve disabled the ‘crop’ feature in the settings, but when it’s active it crops the Helga, Lomo and Instant filters square, crops 1974 almost square, and Cinema into a narrow 16:9 format which really doesn’t work well on vertical images. There’s also a border option and you can vary the output size of the saved images if your iPhone is struggling – like most camera apps it gobbles up memory and so like most camera apps has garnered its fair share of negative reviews on the App Store for regularly crashing if it’s been a while since you last rebooted the phone. If that happens restarting is generally necessary but the I’d have thought the iPhone 3GS would run it well – can anyone confirm that?

If you’re feeling especially creative you can reopen a saved image in order to apply another filter on top. This mechanic of multiple filters has since been done better in a few other apps which allow them to be applied on top of each other before saving, but like a classic movie this app never seems to get old and every so often an update drops a new filter in there. There’s even a desktop version now, although the Photoshopper in me is loathe to stoop to an automated processing technique for ‘proper’ photos.

Anyway, CameraBag for iPhone is brilliant.

QuadCamera

Website / App Store

This is just one of several photography apps from Takayuki Fukatsu, who runs a company called Art&Mobile. Apparently his photo apps are regularly amongst the most downloaded iPhone apps in Japan, particularly ToyCamera which I’ll come to next.

QuadCamera basically copies the likes of the Lomo Actionsampler and Oktomat cameras, which take 4 or 8 shots in quick succession and present them in one frame as a sequence. A quick look at the settings page clearly shows the options available, and also gives you a good idea of the presentation style Art&Mobile favour. As you can see it’s very un-Mac-like, which at first alienated me but it actually does the job very well and I’ve come to rather like its distinctive appearance, which also appears in his most recent app Tiltshift Generator, although not in ToyCamera.

In terms of customisation there’s a slider to alter the delay between each shot in your sequence, whether to shoot 4 or 8 shots and whether to lay them out in a row or in a 2×2 or 2×4 arrangement. There’s a selection of filters: Vivid, Bright, Dull, Hi Con, Grayscale and No Effect. If you choose the 1×4 or 1×8 options the app will lay them out vertically for landscape oriented shots, or horizontally for portrait orientation.

There’s a second menu hidden in the Settings app for the iPhone itself, where you can remove the borders or the vignette, or activate a ‘Tap Anywhere’ shutter release, and deactivate the shutter sound.

QuadCamera is unusual in that it automatically saves the result whether you like it or not. In my case this means I easily end up with a dozen different new photos in my camera roll every time I use it because once you start it’s hard to stop and even though I might not actually like any given result it gets saved regardless. It’s extremely hard not to find something interesting in pretty much every shot you get from it, though, especially with all the different filters to try.

There’s also a lot more you can try with it than just the obvious ‘train coming into a station’ type shot. I had dozens of attempts at the magazine shot below before getting it the way I wanted it! The escalator shot went through the Lolo filter in CameraBag a few times to get the glowing orange. It also makes for unusual panoramas.

There’s not a great deal else, if anything, that duplicates QuadCamera – if there is I’d like to have a look at it. If you don’t already have it, you should definitely check out this app and others from the same developer.

ToyCamera

Website / App Store

It’s another of Takayuki Fukatsu’s apps and I toyed (geddit?) with deleting it quite a few times as it was frustratingly restrictive when it came to customisation. A recent update fixed that though, and so it’s earned a permanent slot on my ‘camera app’ screen.

ToyCamera is designed to mimic the weird colours, blur and vignetting of ‘toy cameras’ such as the plastic Holga and Lomo models. There’s plenty of other apps that offer similar effects as it’s a look that’s very much in vogue, and to that end purists should note that it’s heavily stylised, with extremely strong colour, contrast and B&W toning filters that go way beyond most photos I’ve seen produced by these cameras it’s inspired by. The flipside of this is that in terms of this look, ToyCamera is pretty much rules the roost on the App Store.

Up until recently the app used to apply the filters randomly by default, which was frustrating if the filter it chose didn’t suit the image (they really can be too much sometimes). Now, however, you can choose a specific filter to be used but only before you shoot; you can’t pick an effect to apply to a photo you already have, like you can with CameraBag for example. If you’re into the whole random ‘shoot from the hip’ ethos that the Lomographic people promote then you can activate the random mode and select which effects you’d like it to choose from.

Other settings include the standard image size settings (with a full range of sizes from 320 x 427 up to 1200 x 1600), the option to crop square and/or apply a vignette, and whether or not you’d like to upload to the Big Canvas Photoshare community. I’ve never used this as there’s just too many photo sharing communities out there for me to keep up with, but it’s there if you want it. Ideally a future update of the app would add Twitter and Facebook and all the usual suspects, which is actually something that several other apps could do with sorting out in the same vein as Best Camera has (the best example of a one-touch sharing solution – I’ll cover it in a subsequent post).

Apart from that it’s a fun little app that offers pretty much all the crazy extreme ‘toy camera’ effects you could possibly want.

Tiltshift Generator

Website / App Store

Yet another photo app from Art&Mobile, designed by Takayuki Fumatsu and Takuma Mori. It’s an example of a function that is covered by other apps in the store (such as Tiltshift – App Store), but to my tastes this is the better example, with a more pleasing effect and the same sleek interface which I liked so much in Quadcamera.

Tiltshift lenses are expensive lenses that allow you to shift the focus around by tilting the lens independently of the camera body, creating bizarre depth of field effects that trick the eye into thinking it’s looking at a miniature model of a life-size scene. It’s possible to fake the effect by applying heavy blur to a photo, leaving a strip or area sharp. Tiltshift Generator gives you this ability, as well as the option to alter the contrast, brightness and saturation, and add a vignette.

Like many other apps, you have the option to shoot a photo from within, or open one from your library. Then you select the area you want to keep sharp (or protect for blurring). In the example above I’ve used the ‘strip’ option but you can also switch to a circular selection. As you can see, there’s a central pair of thick bars, then two lighter outer bars. Inside the thicker bars stays sharp, and between that and the outer bars the blur blends in. Moving the slider adjusts how ‘quickly’ the blend occurs across the photo.

The next tab along covers the saturation, brightness and contrast controls. Finally there’s a vignette slider, and then saving and export options. Export lets you mail it out or post to Twitter.

If there is any room for improvement with Tiltshift Generator, it’s that the contrast and brightness sliders are very sensitive and it’s very easy to make a small precise adjustment and then nudge it when you remove your finger from the screen. The iPhone sensor doesn’t have the greatest dynamic range in the world so it’s all too easy to blow the hell out of the highlights, or create large chunks of sold black in the corners with the vignette – but a little tweaking can usually find a good middle ground. Also, the save size is set to 800×600 but I believe this will change in a future update.

I’ve found you don’t need to limit yourself to making traditional tiltshift photos, and have used the app to blur the corners of photos in a ‘Holga’ style, as well as to create depth of field on my 3G iPhone.

I’m a big fan of vignettes and slightly de-saturated contrasty images, so this app has seen almost as much use as CameraBag since its release. Highly recommended!

That’s all for now but plenty to get your teeth into if you’ve not heard of any. Next time, Pano, Polarize and SnapBox.

Thanks for reading!