Photogene
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Daily iPad App: Photogene
Unlike many, I didn't buy the iPhone 4S for Siri. It's nice to have a voice assistant, but what I really wanted was the camera. I shoot a lot of photos throughout the day using my iPhone and have been looking for a good image editor to complement its camera. Now with PhotoStream, I am no longer limited to using the iPhone for editing. I can automatically transfer my photos and edit them on my iPad, a convenience that led me to try Photogene for the iPad. Photogene is a fantastic editing application that's great for tweaking and touching up photos. You name it and Photogene has it. It lets you crop, straighten, resize, sharpen, reduce noise, adjust color, correct red-eye and remove unwanted blemishes or spots. If you want to get more creative, there's also specialized effects like reflection or vignette and standard effects like dodge & burn, blur, and grayscale. You can add captions and text to images and apply artistic filters such as sepia or charcoal. There's even several categories of presets that'll let you add a border or change the look of your photo in just a few taps. And if you don't like what you have done, there's multiple undo and redo. One of my favorite features is the collage creator which takes up to six photos and turns them into one image using templates. The app comes with a handful of collage templates and you can buy a pack of 60 that gives you twelve designs for each group of photos (12 templates for a 2 photo collage, 12 templates for a 3 photo collage, and so on). When you're done, you can export your images back to your iPad's photo library, upload them to an online web service like Dropbox, Flickr or Picasa, or share them via email, Facebook or Twitter. If you have a printer, you can use AirPrint to get a hard copy. Photogene is available for $2.99 from the App Store and is a must have for anyone that uses their iOS device for photos or image editing.
My top 3 iPhone apps: Sam Levin of AppMinute
As a guy who regularly checks apps for a living (on AppMinute), Sam Levin knows which apps work and which ones don't so when he recommends and app, you know he's using it. This week Sam tells us his ever-rotating list of top 3 apps (again, called his favorites, but they happen to be often-used). The apps discussed are: Say it and mail it recorder SoundHound Photogene
Photogene for iPad: More features, more coolness
Who said you can't do content creation on the iPad? Every day, I am seeing more and more apps that allow you to create, modify, or extend content in ways that are approaching, but not yet quite equal to, what you can do on a desktop or full featured laptop. A case in point is Photogene, a U.S. $3.99 app that has been upgraded from the iPhone version that we've positively reviewed in the past. The app has doubled in price, but comes with some significant updates like the ability to modify curves. Photogene lets you crop and straighten photos, sharpen them, adjust levels and curves, apply filters, and create frames and selective blurs. No, it's not Photoshop, but you can really improve your photos and then export them by mail, Facebook, Twitter, or iPhoto. You can also just save them to your iPad photo gallery. Having a much bigger screen to work on makes all the difference between this version and the iPhone incarnation. You probably can't make a bad photo good, but there are a myriad of enhancement tools that can make a good photo more interesting. Like all such apps, moderation is the key. Click here to see a video of the app in action. I'm pretty surprised at the speed that apps are coming to the iPad. It seems that every time I visit the app store, there are updates to my older iPhone apps collection. I think we'll see video editing, more sophisticated drawing tools, and audio editing apps that will go a long way to making the iPad a solid content creation tool. Apple needs to respond to these initiatives by making it easy to get content on and off of the iPad. Options to do that now are limited and non-intuitive. It's a big issue for many potential buyers, and Apple would have to be deaf and blind to ignore the pressure. Maybe the necessary changes will be made, but how quickly is anyone's guess. Perhaps we'll hear something positive when version 4.0 of the software is previewed tomorrow. Meanwhile, enjoy well thought-out apps like Photogene, and keep your fingers crossed. Here's some shots of Photogene at work on one of my photos from Lake Powell: %Gallery-89963%
iPad apps: creativity unleashed
We love to create things: drawings, movies, photos, songs, and, on occasion, stunning literary imagery with the help of text styling. While Apple didn't necessarily blow us away with its offerings on this front for the iPad (no GarageBand, iPhoto, or iMovie, for instance), 3rd party developers are naturally happy to oblige. We were frankly surprised at some of the depth and functionality we discovered in the App Store, but while what we have here is a nice start, we're even more curious to see what sort of creativity these developers can coax out us with a few months of iPad experience under their belts and a better handle on the strengths and weaknesses of the system. For the time being follow us after the break as we run you through some of our existing favorites. Not enough apps for you? Check out some of our other roundups!
Photogene is a photo genius for your iPhone
In my recent review of AutoStitch I mentioned Photogene [App Store] which is kind of like a miniature Photoshop for the digital pictures you take on your iPhone.It has a boatload of functions, which will let you fix and enhance your digital images without having to offload them to another image editor on a Mac or PC.Here's some of the functionality: Enhance photos with color adjustment and sharpen tools Crop and straighten photos Add text balloons Create a variety of frames Adjust Histogram Correct Gamma Increase/decrease saturation Adjust color temperature Multiple undo and redo The latest version, released earlier this month, includes support for OS 3.0, adds some new effects, and updates the GUI. Of course no iPhone app is going to replace Photoshop, but Photogene has seemed to capture the features that people really want in getting their iPhone photos in tip top shape for emailing or saving elsewhere. With the new 3 megapixel camera in the new iPhone hardware, Photogene will be even more indispensable. Some of the icons are not obvious in function, but they are quickly learned. I would have liked to see noise reduction among the features, but the developer has created a separate app called NoiseBlaster [App Store] that removes noise from iPhone images. It's an additional $0.99, but I would have liked it included in Photogene.Photogene works on the iPod touch as well, but you'll have to import images since the touch has no built in camera, at least not yet.At US$2.99 it's hard to go wrong if you use your iPhone camera as much as I do.
