iPhone App Reviews

XLCamera

Tony Mei | Jan 6, 2012 Photo & Video

User rating: (1 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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XLCamera (0.99$) by Maksym Tsanko

Available on iPhone & iPod Touch

According XLCamera, you can enjoy better “pictures at low light with much better quality.” This sets off alarm bells immediately. I’m skeptical of any app that claims to boost your iPhone camera’s picture taking ability. Does XLCamera live up to it’s hype, or does it fall short like dozens of other photo apps?

Let’s look at technique behind XLCamera’s photo enhancement. XLCamera uses two-step process to brighten and enhance dark images. There’s a ‘torch’ function that toggles your camera flash to stay on. An additional a built in slider adjusts images by tweaking with color saturation and hues. The slider doesn’t make images magically brighter, but increase the warmness and blurs the sharp edges associated with flash night-photography.

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Tags: $.99, camera, photo editing, photos, Tony Mei

Slideshow+

Michael (Admin) | Dec 1, 2011 Photo & Video

User rating: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Slideshow+ ($1.99) by Socusoft

Available on iPhone & iPod Touch

There’s probably a billion slideshow apps in the App Store, but this is the first one I’ve ever tried. With that said… this one’s pretty good! From the first time I opened the app I probably could have made the video below in about five minutes if I hadn’t been screwing around and tinkering with all the tools it offers for fancying up photo slideshows.

Slideshow+ lets you import photos from your camera roll, Facebook, Flickr, or Picasa and you can add tunes from the Music app (formerly known as the iPod). It’s super easy to get things started and slap together a quick video, but doing things like moving photos around and adding title slides is more difficult.

This slideshow uses Slideshow+’s Classic Theme with random transitions throughout

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Tags: photos

BowShot

James | Jan 3, 2010 Photo & Video

User rating: (2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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To start off, BowShot isn’t a game.  Some of you might have come here thinking that BowShot is a game of timing and skill, but you would be wrong.  You don’t shoot a little bow and arrow at balloons or fake ducks as the name might suggest.  No, we are actually pronouncing bow, as in bow wow wow, not bow, as in projectile weaponry.  Turns out though, this was a good move on Fj Ideas Co’s part because I’m not a big fan of those games.

BowShot is in fact a wonderful photography app that helps you take pictures of your dog.  I’m assuming you could use it to take pictures of other animals as well, but I only tested it on my dog, Ava.  The basic idea here is that it makes a strange sound, getting the attention of the dog and then snaps a picture.  It works like a freakin charm.  There is a slide bar in the settings that can adjust the time between sound and shutter.  This feature helps if your dog has a very slow reaction time or an extremely short attention span.  There are 40 crazy/annoying sounds to choose from and you can set five of those as favorites on the camera screen.  Ava’s personal favorites seemed to be the “squeaky toy” and the “baby scream”.  It even allows you to record your own crazy/annoying sound and use that to grab your poor dog’s attention.

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Tags: $.99, photos

OldCamera

Michael (Admin) | Aug 20, 2009 Photo & Video

User rating: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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From the same dude who made QuadCamera and ToyCamera comes OldCamera. Can you guess what it does? That’s right… it makes your pics look really old!

Takayuki Fukatsu has built a pretty great foundation for his camera apps which includes all kinds of stuff in the Settings panel such as randomly applying any of several different filters, vignetting on/off, square mode on/off, and various image sizes. The only real difference between OldCamera and ToyCamera is the choice of filters that can be applied. OldCamera comes equipped with several different kinds of black & white plus a weird thing called Cyanotype that turns your pics blue.

I personally prefer ToyCamera… which I use ALL the time… but OldCamera is also a good quality camera app and, if black & white is your thing, it’s a great buy for just a dollar.

iTunes Link – OldCamera
iTunes Link – ToyCamera
Version 3.5.1
Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS3.0.1

Tags: $.99, photo sharing, photos

B-Day Giveaway: QuadCamera

Michael (Admin) | Jul 30, 2009 Photo & Video

User rating: (6 votes, average: 3.83 out of 5)

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If you missed out on ToyCamera, try this one on for size… QuadCamera shoots up to eight images in succession and assembles them in a single pic. It’s a little quirky but still a pretty cool toy to play with!

iTunes Link – QuadCamera
Takayuki’s website

Playing around with some camera movement during my 8 snaps

* Today is iPhone App Reviews.net’s birthday *

Tags: $1.99, photos

B-Day Giveaway: ToyCamera

Michael (Admin) | Jul 30, 2009 Photo & Video

User rating: (4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)

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Once again my iPhone App Store says an app has “No Ratings” but ToyCamera definitely does have ratings… 282 to be exact, and they amount to a well-deserved 3.5 star average.

This app is on my FIRST iPhone screen, just below the default camera app. I reviewed it almost six months ago and I still use it all the time! “Normal” iPhone photos just bore me now. ;)

ToyCamera applies all kinds of cool filters to your photos to make them look old & dusty or weird & artsy, depending on your perspective. It’s definitely a winner!

iTunes Link – ToyCamera
Takayuki Fukatsu’s website

Terry the Dog standing guard while I nap in the John Deere hat I found on the street

* Today is iPhone App Reviews.net’s birthday *

Tags: $1.99, photos

B-Day Giveaway: Frame C@rds

Michael (Admin) | Jul 30, 2009 Utilities

User rating: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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I’ve tried Christmas C@rds, Halloween C@rds, and Valentine & Love C@rds, and now I’m trying out Frame C@rds for the first time today! It’s just as great as all those other C@rds apps, but it’s specifically for photos and you’re not limited to any specific theme.

Frame C@rds features card templates made from photographic elements as well as more basic templates that are intended for single or multiple photos… and of course text and photo handling are nearly perfect! That seems to be Hot Chili Apps’ trademark and, out of all the hundreds of apps I’ve tried over the past year, I have yet to see anyone else make this kind of app work as seamlessly. Also, the last time I reviewed a C@rds app I don’t think it had the photo effects that it has now… you can change your imported photo(s) to black and white or sepia! Kewl.

WHERE MY DOGS AT (oops, forgot a yipee! my bad)

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Tags: $1.99, greeting cards, photos

LOMO Camera

Michael (Admin) | Jul 14, 2009 Photo & Video

User rating: (8 votes, average: 4.63 out of 5)

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I regularly keep 100+ apps loaded on my iPhone and one of my favorites is ToyCamera which I almost use more often than my iPhone’s regular camera… granted, I have an iPhone 3G (not S) so I’m not giving up any fancy new features like autofocus, but even if I had a 3GS I’d probably still use it all the time! That’s how frakkin cool it is… it makes lame photos a little less lame, and cool photos that much cooler.

LOMO Camera is a lot like ToyCamera in that it imitates the visual effect of an old-timey piece of crap shutterbox, specifically the Lomo LC-A. The Lomo isn’t actually all that old or crappy – it was first introduced in 1984 and sports some cool features – but this Russian-made camera has made a pretty big name for itself among photography nuts and avant-garde weirdos, and now Westarting Studio has their own iPhone-ified version available in the App Store.

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Tags: $2.99, photos

Puzzle Quiz

Michael (Admin) | May 7, 2009 Games

User rating: (4 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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Puzzle Quiz is on sale for $.99. Regular price is $1.99.

Just like the match 3 games that Swain is so crazy for, there’s a whole mess of photo puzzle apps in the App Store. Puzzle Quiz is one of the latest entries in the scambled photo genre and it challenges you to not only reassemble some really cool photos but it also tests you with trivia about each location pictured, hence the “quiz” part of the app name.

DigitalFun built 15 default puzzles into Puzzle Quiz and each one is a photo from a different part of the world. After you unscramble each pic you’re given a chance to earn a time bonus by answering a really freakin’ hard trivia question about the location pictured, and if you complete all 15 puzzles fast enough you get to put your name on the global scoreboard which is pretty unusual for this type of game.

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Tags: $1.99, photos, puzzle

ToyCamera

Michael (Admin) | Feb 10, 2009 Photo & Video

User rating: (3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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After having my fun with QuadCamera for a while I really wanted to see what Takayuki Fukatsu’s ToyCamera could do, and it’s just as kickass as Quad even though it only shoots one pic at a time! It simulates the optical quirkiness found in “toy cameras” that, waaaaaay back in the day, were built to be as cheap as humany possible. The irony is that the toy camera’s imperfections made for some really cool photography, and that’s what this app helps you create.

ToyCamera isn’t just about photo filters… it’s also about photo surprises, much like the cheap plastic cameras this app tries to emulate. Behind the “info” icon is a bunch of effects that can be toggled on and off, things like sepia tone, vintage warm tone, yellow, green, black and white, and several others. By default all of these filters are set to On, and when you take a picture with the app’s built-in camera you get a surprise! A filter is randomly applied to your pic, and if you love what just happened you can share it with the world by uploading it to a free app called Big Canvas PhotoShare by Big Canvas, Inc.

If you prefer to know what filter will be applied to your photos you can turn off everything but the effect you want, or select just a few if you like surprises of a limited variety. Unfortunately these filters can’t be applied to existing photos on your camera roll which I find tragic… imagine how cool it would be to go back to your fav pics and make them look like they were shot 30 years ago, or at least by someone with just a tiny bit of talent? The filter effects in ToyCamera are great and can make even the dumbest photo look halfway interesting, so I’m really hoping this feature will come around in a future update.

Another feature that would be super-handy would be showing the cropping lines in camera view if you have cropping turned on. Right now you just have to mentally chop off the top and bottom of your iPhone screen while you snap photos in this mode because it seems that’s how ToyCamera crops things.

My feature wishlist aside, I love what this app does. QuadCamera is fun although sort of a novelty, but ToyCamera could legitimately replace your iPhone’s default camera because every photo you take with this app gets saved to your camera roll automatically as a single frame. $1.99 seems like a fair price, and if the usefulness of the filters could be expanded it may even be worth a buck or two more.

Tags: $1.99, photos

QuadCamera – Multi Shot Cam

Michael (Admin) | Feb 10, 2009 Photo & Video

User rating: (3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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You know those photo booths where you sit there while it pops flashes in your face and then spits out a strip of photos of you making an ass of yourself? That’s what QuadCamera does! Kind of. It obviously won’t spit anything out for you to stick to the fridge, but it does produce a series of images that get strung together and saved to your camera roll.

QuadCamera is pretty sweet… you can set it to take four photos or eight, you get to choose whether the images are arranged in a row or tiled in two columns, there’s an option to shoot in black & white for you artsy types, and you can even adjust the length of delay in between photos to go as long as 3 seconds. The fun part comes when you snap the pic and your iPhone makes the camera noise on each photo snap, just like those fashion and sports photographers with their big expensive cameras that shoot several frames at a time.

The iPhone’s camera is notoriously bad at capturing anything but a very, very still photo so unfortunately you’re still screwed if your subject is moving around, but I’m sure there are times when a little motion can make your photo series look that much cooler. QuadCamera also applies ToyCamera‘s retro vignette effect to photos where the corners look a little darker than the rest of the image. I think it looks pretty cool and it’s definitely not a bad thing, but it’s something you should be ready for just in case you’re not a fan of this kind of photography.

If Takayuki Fukatsu could figure out a way to make QuadCamera save each image individually (instead of as a single-image series) this app would be a total must-have. I don’t know if that’s even possible but, as it stands right now, it’s mostly just a fun toy that does exactly what it promises and it does it well. $1.99 seems fair enough, but according to the App Store description the price will be rising to $2.99 after some user-generated improvements are implemented in a future update.

Tags: $1.99, photos

ImageTouch

Splash Jackson | Dec 16, 2008 Photo & Video

User rating: (7 votes, average: 4.29 out of 5)

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Intellicore has done a fine job at creating a collage program that allows you to be creative with the photos stored on your iPhone or iPod Touch. ImageTouch is a simple, effective, and easy-to-use collaging tool with a built-in tutorial that will have you creating in no time.

When you open ImageTouch, you are greeted with a clean menu interface that gives you the option to see your last collage, start a new collage, view a list of all your collages, or view the video tutorial. Start with the tutorial: Overall, the program is simple to use, but there are some multi-touch actions that differ from what you may be used to (ie. shaking the iPhone removes the menu instead of just waiting for it to disappear like in Apple’s Photo app). Once you become an ImageTouch veteran, it’s time to begin.

As of review time, I got to work with the most recent version of ImageTouch and the previous version. One of the best improvements in the new version is the background color selection option when you start your collage. This seemed to be an issue for some in the original version, but now with its pop-up color menu, choosing a background color is as easy as pie. It would be nice to see more choices such as graphics or even the option to choose an image from your own photo library to use as a background.

When you have your color set, it’s time to lay down some photos. It’s as simple as clicking the “+” icon and flipping through your photo library to choose a picture. From there, you can resize, rotate, and choose a photo border style. Sadly, you cannot change your photo’s color style (ie. sepia, black and white, etc.), though it would be an addition that would be greatly appreciated.

After you have your photos in place, you can then spice up your collage with decorations. This is probably one of the key features to the collage art form. The decorations that exist are well-designed and superior quality; however, the selection of decorations is lacking. As of testing time, you have decorations for “Winter and Summer Hollidays” and “Feelings.” While these are valid and useful categories, I can’t keep pasting palm trees on graduation collages. Simply put: We need more decorations! This to me should be the priority update and would make this app a more commonly used tool and not just a one-time novelty. A close second much needed addition to ImageTouch would be the ability to add text (either by decorations or an actual text tool). Adding words to a collage is such an integral part of the collaging process and should be standard in any collage application.

One of the strongest features of ImageTouch is the export option of your collages. Whether you email your collage as a postcard (with the built-in email client) or export it into your photo library, your end product is a crisp and high 640×960 resolution (roughly 8×13 inches) image of your collage. Some users have complained of blurry images in their photo library after exporting. This is due to the high-end nature of the photo resolution. If you want a photo that displays nicely on your iPhone, shake the iPhone to hide the menu and take a screen snapshot of your collage (by pressing the Home button and Sleep/Lock button at the same time).

To put the finishing touches on your collage, you are given the options to title your masterpiece, add tags, create a location for your collage (either via text input or Google), and enter dates to mark the time of when your collage took place.

All in all, ImageTouch is an excellent collaging program with many useful features. I like being able to combine holiday photos of my kids and email them in one shot to family members that live far away. With its intuitive tools and superior quality, ImageTouch will help you become a collage master in no time!

Tags: $2.99, collage, decorations, email, holiday, photos