photo+editing
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Ava Photo cleans up those iPhone portraits
You have a lot of pictures of friends and families, but you know those pictures don't always capture them at their best. Ava Photo (free until Jan 31) is a sharp little iOS app providing several tools to make those portraits look a lot better and more presentable. There are similar apps that retouch images, but some wind up looking pretty unnatural and obviously "doctored". Some apps let you reshape a face or nose, or change eye color. That's not the purpose of Ava Photo -- it uses a much lighter touch. It cleans up blemishes, smooths skin, removes circles under the eyes, and it has filters designed for portraits to change the color cast. It's easy to undo any changes, and there is a handy button for comparing your changes to the original. Ava Photo also has settings for pictures taken in low light conditions. In my tests, I found I could improve almost any photo of a person, without making it look pasty or phony. Yes, you can push the effects, but nothing forces you to do that. Some photos that could best be described as harsh were softened and looked much more flattering. There are some minor editing tools so you can crop the photos, and you can then save them to your camera roll or share to Instagram. If you don't want to work the various controls yourself, there is an automatic function with several levels of intensity. I preferred to do my own editing. Ava Photo is a nice tool, especially for free during this 100 percent off sale. It's great for selfies or for portraits of any friends or relatives that you'd like to perfect and improve. Ava Photo is not universal, it requires iOS 6 or later, and it is optimized for the latest iPhone sizes.
RebelSauce for iOS has a lot of tasteful filters
With so many apps that apply filters to your photos it's getting harder to find the good ones. Add RebelSauce to the list of clever photo editing apps for iOS. This US$0.99 app has almost infinite variations that mimic classic film styles. Of course there are the usual editing tolls like crop, brightness, saturation and color temperature, but the app gets interesting in the application of grain, old film styles, and different tonalities to your photos. Each filter that you apply has a + and - button, so there is a lot of control. If you are willing to experiment, the variations are incredibly wide. As much as I liked the filters, I thought the app was rather opaque in operation. When you first open it, there are on-screen guides, but it wasn't always obvious what those guides were trying to reveal. When you actually start using the app it can be confusing too. Back and forward arrows make changes, but not always the expected changes. A forward arrow might mean save your work, but instead it takes you to output options or destinations. A left arrow means your edits will be lost, with a warning, happily, to prevent disaster. After awhile I figured it out, but it could have been a lot more intuitive. RebelSauce is still an excellent filter package. The filters never go overboard, and there is enough flexibility to get exactly the look you want. I especially liked the variable application of film grain. RebelSauce has a variety of $0.99 upgrades for different kinds of filters, and I think the amount of extra purchases is excessive for a $0.99 app. There are 9 purchases, or for $5.99 you can have all 9. Since it is hard to see what each package does in advance, I think the filters are worth avoiding. RebelSaunce requires iOS 8 or later. It is not universal, and it's optimized for the iPhone 5 and 6 series of phones. I like the filters. Don't like all the extras.
Exposure for iOS lets you selectively edit and color a photo
Exposure (US$1.99) is a slick iOS app that lets you selective apply effects to your photos. Of course the app also lets you globally apply an effect too, like sepia tint or black and white effects, but the nice feature here is the ability to use your finger to paint out an overlay and substitute a color or effect. The app is smart so it can pretty easily separate objects. For example, you can paint a building in color while the background remains black and white. In general, the effect stays in the proper place and doesn't splash out of the selected area, although you may need to do a bit of touch up, which is easy. There are numerous effects in the app, like intense colors, a Picasso effect, glows, pencil sketch, watercolor and more. I thought the tilt-shift effect was well implemented, allowing objects in your photo to look like miniatures. An undo command lets you step back and rework part of the photo, and you can completely clear an effect and start again. You can zoom in or out of your photo to make it easier to define the area you are working on. There is also the ability to open your photo directly in another photo editor for any finishing touches, cropping, or adding text or frames. You won't want to use this app on every photo, but when you need the effects it offers, it can make for a stunning presentation. I found no glitches using the app. It was responsive and easy to use. Tutorials are built in, plus links to video examples. Exposure requires iOS 7. It's a universal app, and I found it particularly easy to work on using my iPad, but it's just fine on an iPhone too. The app is optimized for the iPhone 5 and 6 series.
Swipe N Clean: A low-cost and efficient iOS photo editor
Swipe N Clean (US$0.99) is a new full-featured photo editor for iOS that is easy to use and can be a one-stop app for many iOS photographers. The app contains 75 filters, tools for cropping, adding text and emoticons, and basic controls for brightness, contrast and saturation. One tool I don't see often in similar apps is a resize tool that scales up or down. This app will resize photos, and it works reasonably well. Some controls are handled with swipes. Swipe left to add photos to the delete queue, or right to keep them in your camera roll. If you delete something, the app preserves the trashed photos should you change your mind. From the main menu, you can go into edit mode or sharing mode which lets you send your finished photo to family and friends. Adding filters is enabled with a single tap on the filter preview you like. You can go back if you don't like it. Swipe N Clean also features the ability to paint color onto an photo using what it calls the Splash tool. The first step is to make your color photo monochrome, then you use your finger to paint over areas you would like to have re-appear in color. The brush size is adjustable for detailed work, but often your finger covers the area you are painting so you can't always get an exact result. Some apps offset the viewer from your finger, which would be a good idea for a future update of Swipe N Clean. Adding text is easy, but it is hard to reposition the text block after you've typed it in. That's a pretty easy fix too -- the operation is not straightforward the first time you use it and want to move the text. It works, you just have to experiment to understand the workflow. I'd love to see more editing features in the app. Selective color enhancement to particular parts of the image, removing people or objects smoothly, and perhaps the ability to blend two photos. Still, as it is, Swipe N Clean is a capable editor with a lot of tools to enhance your photos. At under a dollar, it is a good value. Swipe N Clean requires iOS 8 or later. It's optimized for the iPhone 5, but not yet for the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus. The app is not universal, so it's not really suited for the iPad resolutions.
Magic Hour for iOS offers almost unlimited filters
Magic Hour (US$1.99) offers 38 preset filters with the ability to modify and save them, giving you an immense number of options when you are modifying your photos. In addition, Magic Hour can let you take photos directly, with locks for focus and exposure, flash, and zoom (digital). The app will also superimpose a grid to make sure your photos are level and help you visualize composition. The main business of Magic Hour is filters, and they are never over the top. Filters are well thought-out, with plenty of natural-looking options. Of course, you can push all the filters to get more saturation or contrast -- that's up to you. The app also features an assortment of frames and textures, some of them appearing as presets with filters, providing one-click options to enhance your photos. Fine-tuning tools like curves, rotate, crop, tilt-shift and black and white modes are also included. Using Magic Hour is easy. You take or import your photo, select from the array of filters, and then tune the individual filters to taste. Add a frame if you desire, then save the final image to your camera roll or send it to friends directly from the app. You can send your masterwork via Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Dropbox and E-mail and you can print via AirPrint if you are equipped for it. There is also a free filter market where you can share your creations with others around the world or download some that you like. Magic Hour also offers additional filters like HDR, Posterize and Toon at $0.99 each or all three for $1.99. Frankly, I'd like to see all the filters included in the base price. Magic Hour is a nice package. I am still a big fan of Snapseed (free), which has numerous filters and HDR conversions to die for. Still, Magic Hour has a greater variety of filters and more ability to tune them, so I think it is worthy of serious consideration. The app is not universal, but should be. It requires iOS 4.3 or later.
[Updated] Pixelmator is a standout photo editor for the iPad
Pixelmator for iPad had an impressive demo at the Apple event a couple of weeks ago, and the app was impressive. Now Pixelmator has hit the App Store and it's been fun to use in real-world tests. The US$4.99 app (introductory price) was designed from the ground up to be iPad friendly, so it's not a port of the Mac version of the popular photo editing app. This is a complete editing environment, not something cut down to size for the iPad. It works with both bitmapped and vector graphics, supports layers and can import Photoshop files as well as JPG, PNG and TIF variants. It also supports some core Apple technologies like iCloud Drive and Handoff. The app can also export Photoshop layers intact. It also supports a large variety of filers, plus tools like repair, lighten, darken, sharpen and more. For portraits, it can smooth skin and remove red-eye. I opened some landscape photos I had on hand and the results from Pixelmator were certainly good. I found useful things like curves and saturation tools. I could work selectively on parts of the image, changing things like sky colors and leaving the rest of the photo alone. Some of the correction tools are automatic, so one touch of the screen and your photo improves. However, you are not in any way limited to automatic adjustments only and you won't want to be. The app auto-saves your work (a feature of the Mac version), which is a nice way to protect your work and something only rarely seen on iOS. I appreciated the lighting effects, like bokeh and CGI light leaks, and some of the vintage photo effects. You won't use all of these features in every editing session, but when you want them, you'll be glad they are included in Pixelmator. Color correction tools are plentiful. There are 8 correction presets, so you have curves as mentioned, brightness, contrast, saturation, and white balance adjustments. I did my testing on a lowly iPad 2 and found the app speedy and responsive, although the Pixelmator team recommends the latest and greatest iPads. One major tool missing on my iPad 2 is the repair tool, roughly the equivalent of Photoshop's Content-Aware fill tool. It is left out of older iPads like mine -- likely due to performance issues -- but the App Store specs don't reveal this. It's an important feature, and I have other apps that run on the iPad 2 with similar rendering features that work just fine, so I'm disappointed it couldn't be put into this release. I'm hoping the Pixelmator team will re-think this. [Good news! The version of Pixelmator released October 31 now adds the missing features so it runs on older iPads. I gave it a try on my iPad 2 and now the healing tools work. They are not speedy, but the result is worth the wait. Kudos to the Pixelmator team for listening!] Other than that caveat, I think Pixelmator now stands as the very best image editor for the iPad. The Photoshop Mix app is also quite powerful and is well integrated to Adobe's total workflow, but Pixelmator has a smarter layout and seems easier to use. I do wish the Pixelmator Team would do a version that works on the new iPhones. Maybe that will come along one day if there is demand, and I'd love to be able to do this kind of quality editing on my iPhone 6. If you do a lot of image editing on your iPad, I think Pixelmator is a must buy. Pixelmator requires iOS 8 and remember that not all features will work on older iPads.
Flare 2 is a solid photo effects editor for your Mac
Flare 2 for Mac (currently on sale for US$9.99 regularly $14.99) is a well thought out and executed app for photographers who want to get beyond the basics in photo effects. The app comes with dozens of filters, and each can be adjusted by the user, making the options almost infinite. In addition to things like the usual color washes, there are textures, borders, frames, tilt-shift, Bokeh rings (out of focus points of light), vintage film effects and more. RAW formats are supported, along with niceties like unlimited undo and batch processing. Photos can be exported as JPG, PNG and TIF. There's a complete online user guide which is detailed. Using the app is simple. Import your image, select a filter, then modify to taste. Previews are real time, and the layout of the app encourages experimentation. The effects are artistic, and I never wound up with anything horrible looking. The developers know their way around image editing, so you don't get cartoonish photos at the end. As a bonus, Flare 2 offers a free, universal iOS photos extension called Flare Effects, which adds Flare's filters as editing options to Apple's Photos and Camera app. That is to say, after installing and setting up Flare Effects for iOS (it walks you through the dead-simple instructions) you can use the filters and effects that that Flare offers from within the two apps from Apple. Note that I'm not calling Flare Effects for iOS an app, because it's an extension. Don't think of it as an image editor like many others. Instead, it adds Flare's great filters to two apps you're probably already using: Camera and Photos. It sounds confusing, but once you launch the app and follow the setup instructions, it's not. Flare 2 for the Mac requires Yosemite. It's a well done photo editing app that offers some things the 'big boys' like Photoshop don't have.
PhotoDirector: Impressive new iOS photo editing app
PhotoDirector (free with one in-app purchase) is new to iOS but the company that created it, CyberLink, has an impressive product line that features photo editors for Mac and Windows. The app debuts with some impressive editing features including smart object removal, which is similar to content aware fill in Photoshop. It's great to have that in an iOS app, and there are plenty of other powerful features as well. PhotoDirector has the usual array of cropping, hue/saturation tools, and an abundance of filters. It allow selective adjustments by color, which is a nice idea. Want to enhance the trees? Click on a sample shade, and then the saturation tool works only on the greens. The app also has adjustments for smoothing skin. I was especially interested in the smart object removal tool, and it worked quite well. You select an object and the app intelligently creates an offset magnified view of where you are painting with your finger, which makes for faster masking. When you tap the apply button the object is gone ... or at least mostly gone. As with Photoshop, you might have to clean up a few remnants of the original image. I used the tool to remove people, electric poles, words, and a barn from photos, and the tool performed very well. You can see an example below. The filters are OK. The HDR filter worked about as well as most similar features in other apps -- in other words, not very well without having an actual HDR image. Used sparingly, it could be effective. I think the best tool of its type is the HDR filter in Snapseed. You can take photos from directly within the app, but there is no compelling reason to do so. There are sharing tools for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and more. I thought the only thing missing was a sharpening tool. If that feature was there, I'd consider PhotoDirector a complete editing solution. I hope they add it. PhotoDirector should also be universal so the iPad can use it at the proper resolution. As a first iOS product, PhotoDirector is really a very able editor. It's ad supported, but the ads are not intrusive. An in-app purchase of US$4.99 removes the ads, increases the resolution of saved photos, and offers unlimited object removal. I think the purchase is worth it just because this is such a capable editor, but you can certainly do a lot with the free version and see if it fits you. PhotoDirector requires iOS 6 or later. It ran fine under iOS 8, and on my iPhone 6 I liked using it with the bigger screen as compared to my iPhone 5s. PhotoDirector should be on your short list of editing apps in iOS, so grab it if you are in the market for a solid tool. The smart object removal is particularly well done and impressive.
MultiCam for iOS can greatly improve your photos
Since cameras were first invented photographers have gone through this drill: Focus, set exposure, take photo. Some innovative cameras like the Lytro let you interactively change your focus after you take your image, but the Lytro hasn't set the world on fire due mainly to buggy software and small sensors. MultiCam (U.S. $1.99) cleverly turns the whole process around. You take your photo, then select the proper exposure and focus. The app works by taking a series of three or six exposures almost instantly. It does the same with focus, taking up to 15 shots with varying focus. When you are done, you see the photo with two sliders: one to change the exposure, another to see all the focus options. Moving those sliders, you see the changes in the picture all happening smoothly and in real time. When you have the combination you like, you save the photo. Both the front and back cameras are supported. You can save the MultiCam shots in the app's internal library, and if you throw those away you will have only the image you saved. Chances are good that once you have selected the best combination of focus and exposure, you won't need the originals anyway. I was a little dubious when I started my tests, but Multicam works really well. The multiple exposures/focus stream takes just a few seconds, so you'll want to hold the camera steady. Picking out the best focused and exposed photo is easy on the iPhone's excellent screen, and you can pinch zoom to enlarge the image and check your precise focus. MultiCam is innovative and can truly capture photos that are better exposed and focused that your usual images. I thought it was especially effective on closeup subjects like flowers and insects, and even moving objects at a distance where you might not get the focus right in one shot. Of course the iPhone under iOS 8 allows for the rapid taking of multiple photos like the motor drive on convention DSLRs, but they will all be exposed the same and at the same focal plane. MultiCam is a universal app and it works very well. It's innovative in the way it takes your pictures, and it can certainly make sure you get something better than you might with conventional photo apps. The only suggestion I would make to the developer is that since the app can take multiple exposures, I'd love to see an HDR option added. Then you'll get sharp focus and better dynamic range all in one app. MultiCam requires iOS 8 or later and is highly recommended.