iPhone Apps

iPhone Photography Apps Im currently using (April 2011)

Here’s a list of iPhone apps I’ve been using and a wee bit of blurb about them.

#1 – Hipstamatic
This is a beautiful app that gives you some fantastic retro images, I use this app almost exclusively when snapping pretty much anything.
You have a good list of film, lens and flash styles including coloured gels. Each film roll has its own characteristics; for instance framing or texture effects/faded colour and the lens’ can add things like light leakage. You can buy more film, lens and flash types from the online store as in-app purchases for around 59p each and its worth while browsing through them.

So we have gorgeous colours and tone with the option of hi-res images, albeit in the the square format (1936×1936), but if thats too much you can bring that down as there are processing times attributed to each photo taken and a max limit of 9 images chained up for processing at one time on the hi-res setting. I have noticed the app occasionally crashing especially under heavy use with other apps since IOS 4.3.1 was released but not enough to stop me using it.

I almost forgot to mention you can share your snaps with Flickr, Fuddbook (Facebook), tumblr or email.

EDIT: This app, with all its additional film lens and flash types, is huge. I’ve just realised it comes to around 4GBs of space. The annoying thing is that iTunes doesn’t tell you the actual size on the device but claims its only 25MB. Something to be aware off.

21 April 2011

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#2 – Camera+ 
This is a nice, stills only, replacement for the ‘built-in’ camera app from Apple. It has recently been updated (early 2011 I think) to include the separation of white balance control and tap to focus. This is pretty much amazing, it allows you to tap focus on one thing then tap a little plus button top right of your focus square to separate the white balance meter and drag it around the screen and the white balance changes accordingly.

In addition to that you have some shooting tools: burst mode (but shoots at a lower res, about 640 x (something)); stabiliser and timer.
A litany of basic in-app photo editing tools: white balance tools; adjustments like crop and rotate; borders and effects.

The effects tools range from:
Colour Modes
- vibrancy, sunkissed, redscale, purple haze, so emo, cyanotype, black&white, magic hour, sepia.

Retro Effects
- lomostyle, ’70s, toy camera, hipster, tailfins, fashion, lo-fi, ansel, antique.

Special
- HDR, depth of field, cross process, colour dodge, miniaturise, polarise, grunge, overlay, faded

I Heart  Analogue (in-app purchase required, about 59p)
- diana, silver gelatin, helios, contessa, nostalgia, expired, XPRO C-41, pinhole, chromogenic.

Each of these effects has a slider to vary the strength of each effect.

Of course you can share your snappy snaps to Fuddbook, Twitter or Flickr.

EDIT: Like Hipstamatic, this app with its additional content is quite big. About 1.3GB.

21 April 2011

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#3 – SwankoLab
This is a post-preocessing app for photos taken in another photography app (or any file in your phones photo library).

They tried to make it look like a photo developing lab with sound effects and animations which isn’t too intrusive to its use. When you load a photo into the app you will see a number of virtual chemicals on a shelf that you can swipe through and add at will. Note: each item on the shelf has a unit cost attributed to them and you can only add 8 or so units in total to your virtual development tray. Some are more powerful than others and they range from; noir for black&white images; warm colour fade warm colour boost and their cool colour opposites; edge blur and darken; light leaks and more. All these mixes change depending on the order they are added to the tray.

They do offer preset mixtures which gives you an idea of what you can do with the chemicals and they show which chemicals are in them and the order they are applied. You can buy the rest of the ready-made mixtures/chemicals as an approx. £1.25 in-app purchase.

This is a fairly solid app but if you’re like me and relentlessly punish the app with around 100 or more photos in one session you’ll see the app slowly fall apart, still work but fall apart with buttons and graphics disappearing. To fix just jump to another open app and jump back and it all comes back.

That said, this is an excellent accompaniment to Camera+ or the built in Apple Camera app.

21 April 2011

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I’ll add more apps every now and then.