photoeffects
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Color Lake for iOS adds weather and water to your photos
I'm not sure the innovative Color Lake app solves any real photographic problems I have, but it sure is cool to play with and try on some of my photos taken in the desert. Color Lake (US$1.99) adds rain, snow and water with reflections to any image in your library. You can adjust the wave height, change the weather and manipulate its hue while keeping the image at the original resolution if you desire. I have a lot of photos taken around Arizona and Utah, and loved the ability to create realistic looking bodies of water that accurately reflect the clouds and the mountains. It's not that I needed this functionality, but it works well and has made a few of my photos more interesting than they would have been otherwise. Of course the depiction is a complete fantasy. The author claims the site can also render these scenes as a movie, but I couldn't get that to work on my iPhone 4S. I haven't seen any complaints about this problem from users, so I mention it in passing. Note that the aspect ratio of your image will change because the reflections are added to the bottom of the photo with the default settings. While most settings are obvious, the app lacks built-in help to explain everything without having to experiment. Color Lake is a universal app. It requires iOS 5.0 or greater. All the descriptions in the world aren't as effective as seeing images created with Color Lake, so check the galleries for some examples and screenshots. %Gallery-166325%
Flare 1.4 adds Retina support, Twitter sharing, more
Yesterday we saw an update to Realmac Software's Analog Mac photo effects app; today the news is from Iconfactory, and the app being updated is Flare (currently discounted to US$9.99). Like Analog, Flare (see TUAW review here) provides a way to add and adjust pre-loaded visual effects. Flare comes with quite a few more effects than Analog -- a total of 31 -- and allows quite a bit more in terms of control and the addition of effects. What's new in Flare 1.4? There's now support for Retina displays, there's new high-resolution editing and the user interface has changed. Like many apps updated for OS X Mountain Lion, Flare 1.4 adds a significant number of sharing services including "upload to Twitter." There's a new "Save to Aperture" feature as well. As we noted with the Analog update yesterday, the app supports the external editor mode in Aperture and iPhoto, and adds Lightroom as well. Several bug fixes have also been incorporated. For existing users, it's available immediately from the Updates tab of the Mac App Store.
