Pocket Plastic

Camera+ by taptaptap (aka CamPlus, CameraPlus)

Price: $2.99 (purportedly an introductory offer)
Website: http://campl.us

Go to the URL above and one of the first things you see is a chesty young woman in a low-cut tank top being promoted as the professional photographer who contributed to the design of this new photography app. It gives a cheap GoDaddy.com feel to an otherwise nicely done website and product. Watch the promotional video and the opening 20 seconds alone, with gratuitous shots of Miss Lisa Bettany bending down, leaning forward, and selling the hell out of iPhone photography, and you'll probably agree the use of sex was an intentional decision. If not on her part at the time of shooting, then at least in the process of directing and editing the piece. I don't have a problem with cleavage, but it seemed a very odd choice for a camera app ad.

What it replaces

Camera+ falls into the category of camera replacement apps on the iPhone, while also stepping into the territory of all-in-one workflow apps. The first part means that you could theoretically use Camera+ as your main means of capturing images, and not Apple's barebones "Camera" app; the name itself makes so much clear. Included are some convenient niceties such as a Rule of Thirds composition grid, a 5x digital zoom slider, and a stabilized capture mode that only shoots when your hand is perfectly still. If that's all you want to do, the best app for the job is Gorillacam, which adds a burst capture mode for action scenes and a self-timer, whilst being available for the low price of free.

The second part refers to apps that act like a complete hub for the amateur photographer, and this is where Camera+ excels. It takes the photo, crops, applies lighting corrections, slaps on stylish color treatments, and adds borders before finally sending the result to Facebook/Twitter/Flickr, or an email address. Other apps in this category include Best Camera and Pro Camera. These two other options offer varying but generally superior levels of control over the editing process, but I believe Camera+ is the better choice for most people. For one thing, it takes photos really well, with barely any downtime between shots. In that regard, Best Camera is a poor camera replacement, plus it's extremely easy to ruin a good photo with its editing tools, which tend to blow out highlights and render muted scenes in garish colors. In contrast, Camera+'s post-processing effects are quite well-behaved. There's nothing you haven't seen before, eg. HDR-style lighting, "lomography" saturation and contrast, blue cross-processing tones, but they get the job done quickly and that helps reduce the temptation to fiddle, moving you on to the last step: sharing.

Good looks

It's also modeled on a visual and functional analogy that most photographers will immediately understand: the modern SLR camera. From the moment it's started up, Camera+ presents itself as a physical camera interface. There's a viewfinder, a monochromatic greenish LCD display, and a selection of "Scene" modes to choose from. Employing the latter as a means of choosing quick contrast and lighting fixes is a stroke of genius. It puts casual photographers at ease. The fake camera crudely beeps and bloops like the instrument it emulates. As a result, navigating the user interface is fun and painless, and no feature is hidden more than a few taps away (quite the improvement on some P&S camera menus, actually). Skimming through the shots you've taken (which are stored in the app itself until you decide to export them to the Camera Roll) is done by interacting with a light table metaphor. One nice touch has unedited photos sporting a sprocketed film border, while finalized shots have a clean print border.

All this fancy UI work should come as no surprise to followers of development company taptaptap. Their previous projects include the Classics ebook reader app many credit as the inspiration for iBooks' visual bookshelf (the honor actually goes to Delicious Library) and page flip animations, and a very pretty unit convertor named Convert. If there's a line between form and function, Camera+ probably overstepped it onto the form side in the name of fun. Some minor niggles: the shooting interface is geared for use in a portrait orientation, effects never vary (the Toycamera filter applies the same light leak edge to all photos, uniformly), and they can't be 'stacked' to create new variations.

A matter of trust

As one commenter over at iPhoneography.com observed, taptaptap doesn't have a stellar track record of supporting or improving their apps after launch, for example: Classics hasn't had new books added to its library for about a year. With the launch of iOS 4.0 looming, it would be bad for customers if Camera+ encounters compatibility problems and isn't updated for months. In fact, the new iPhone 4 itself will make two of Camera+'s features obsolete. 5x digital zoom will be in the new OS, while the physical flash unit and better low-light sensitivity will eliminate the need for artificial brightening.

As for that $2.99 special launch price? Take it with a pinch of salt. When Classics launched, it too went for an introductory price of $2.99, and was meant to go up to $4.99. What eventually happened was that the price varied wildly, going as low as 99c on several occasions, as the company tried out different sales tactics and experimented with the market. It's not a big deal in terms of the money, but promising early adopters a special price and then turning around to burn them can make a brand look pretty bad.

Conclusions

So, do you buy it? That depends. Can you make do with the free Gorillacam? If you're getting the new iPhone, does it seem wise to bet that the developer will update Camera+ in a timely manner to work with 5-megapixel images? Do you want fine-grained control over your editing instead of working with presets? I hate nothing more than buying an app on impulse and having it sit there on my screen, unused, taunting me and my lack of self-restraint. Thankfully, I'm so far finding Camera+ to be one I'd be happy to use on a daily basis in place of the standard Camera app. I expect to tire of it in a couple of months when I start to hit up against the ceiling of its presets; when too many photos start to look the same. Taptaptap can get around this by adding a hint of randomness to each application, the way Camerabag Desktop does with its "Reprocessing", or by simply adding new effects on a regular basis. Again, given their track record, this seems unlikely. But in the meantime I'd recommend it as a new toy to play with and maybe get some good shots out of. After all, a healthy set of limitations is sometimes the best catalyst for creativity.

 

Verdict: Recommended

Buy Camera+ in the iTunes App Store.

This $1.99 app from Korea got a major free update today, going from 1.3MB to 34.3MB in size, and proportionately increasing the number of possible effect combinations. Previously, PictureShow came loaded with a small set of preset effects and the ability to add text over a photo, as well as do some basic brightness/saturation editing. The filters, with names such as Lomography, Holgagraphy and MultiExposures, were high quality but rather distinctive, and consistently so – to the point where I used them only on rare occasions to avoid having too many photos look alike.

Version 2 more than doubles the number of filters, while adding 15 frames, 5 "light effects", and 8 noise/distortion overlays, which can be combined to create hundreds of different looks. Some of the new filters are styled along the lines of popular vintage and cross-processed effects found in other apps, but they come into their own when paired with light leaks, scratches, and emulsion-style borders. To make the process of discovery fun, there's a new Shuffle button which mixes things up to give possible starting points for further tweaking in the Color Edit mode. There's also a new quick list view of all the filters; an improvement on the "swipe left through all available options" design of the original version.

In addition to email and Google Blogger export, Flickr uploads are now supported, with Twitter and Facebook promised for the v2.1 update. As before, PictureShow exports photos up to full 3GS resolution of 2048px wide.

If I'd reviewed PictureShow before today, I would have given it 3/5 at the very most. It offered a very narrow set of possibilities, reasonably well executed. With the new (and very unexpected) update, and the promise of more frame styles and variations to come, it's now coming very close to a 5/5.

Price: $1.99
Verdict: Highly recommended
Similar to: Lo-Mob, Camerabag, SwankoLab

Buy PictureShow in the iTunes App Store.
Product website 

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My first photo with the new PictureShow

Most photographers know what they want, even if they haven't found a way to achieve it. They know what part of a scene they'd like to capture and bring out, what effect they'd go for, if they had the means. A great photo often begins in the imagination, and the tale of whether or not it finally exists in a form that pleases the photographer comes down to knowledge, experience, and a little luck.

Many iPhone photographers use the tools available to create images that resemble what's possible with vastly different hardware. Take TiltShift Generator for example, with its wide aperture-like depth of field blurring effects, or ShakeItPhoto, which puts a kinky instant photo twist on stale digital shots.

Chromocam Dots, the first in a series of planned Chromocam apps, goes in the opposite direction. As stated in the developer's press materials, the aim here is not to emulate a look from some point along the timeline of photographic history, or to recreate an effect from professional-level equipment. Chromocam Dots was made to establish an entirely new art form of its own. The look it generates – a melding of photoreality with solid color circles that looks like an offshoot of pointillism – has little in common with what we expect from an app in the "Photography" category.

The methods by which you create and interact with these compositions are organic and intuitive. After taking a photo, you may adjust parameters such as the size and color intensity of the dots, and the speed at which they generate. Press go, and the photo begins to morph. In reality, the changed photo is created as a layer atop the original, and you can fade the opacity of the dots in and out, brighter and darker, by swiping your finger across the entire screen. Shake the iPhone, and the random process begins anew.

In conclusion, Chromocam Dots is a brave move from developer Dan Lipert, and quite unlike anything yet seen on the App Store. My guess is that he built it to fill a personal need, to bring into reality a look that began in his imagination, and for which the tools did not yet exist. The question is only whether other photographers will see value in his creation, and have multicolored dots in mind when they next compose a shot with their iPhones.

Price: $0.99

Buy Chromocam Dots in the iTunes App Store.
Product website: www.chomocam.com 

For all the progress we've made in the field of digital photography, improving even the cheapest optics and sensors to the point that they can now be found in every cellphone, capable of capturing clear and useful images with a minimum of user interference, most of us still yearn for the look of film. The mistakes, the hassle, the "natural" looking grain as opposed to speckled noise, and above all, that randomness befitting of a living organism – born of imperceptible changes in the air, the degradation of rubber seals, the inconsistency of a lab experiment performed with contaminated chemicals.

Film is romantic the way vinyl records are romantic. It's a sloppy, fragile art based on primitive science that shouldn't work, but does, and in doing so reminds us of ourselves.

This week, two new photography apps appeared on the scene with promises to restore some of that charm to our altogether too-easy, too-sterile way of seeing photography in the age of the iPhone. They aren't the first to try, but they might be the closest to success yet.

SwankoLab is Synthetic Corp's followup to the bestselling Hipstamatic, another camera app with retro sensibilities. Where their first effort controversially forced users to embrace the philosophy of shooting on film (one could only take photos for processing, not import existing ones), experimentation is the key experience this time around. Modeled after a darkroom metaphor, SwankoLab has you mixing development chemicals in a metal basin, soaking your prints while the software churns behind the scenes, and then hanging them up on a clothesline for display. The photos, too, are excellent approximations of film captures: alternately rich, colorful, faded, and unusual.

As noted in my preview, this approach aims to distance us from what we're really doing: applying artificial alterations to digital photographs. It's never completely clear what adding any two chemicals will produce; add a third and all bets are off. Most importantly, where one would normally move a slider and be able to observe the changes immediately in a modern editor, SwankoLab makes you wait. Experimentation is bound to the process of developing every frame again from scratch – the ambient sounds of the darkroom's flickering lamp and sloshing fluids are a funeral dirge for instant gratification. To make matters even more unpredictable, the order in which chemicals are introduced into the mix affects results, giving rise to thousands of possible combinations. It's a process more akin to alchemy than arithmetic.

Film Lab is the antithesis of SwankoLab's deliberately-paced paean to film processing. Its user interface has no metaphors tracing back to the roots of film; the only ones on display are the software conventions created with the desktop computer: pop-up menus, scroll bars, and buttons. These are implemented without too much thought, as scrolling sideways through all 76 effects is less than ideal, but for the most part it works as you would expect. In a way, it's a relief to encounter this more modern program after having spent some time in the other virtual darkroom. Suddenly, the immediacy of its effect previews, and the overall feeling of control that it offers, strikes you as a thing not to be taken for granted.

Film Lab contains over 70 preset film looks, many of them named after actual film issues from brands like Ilford, Kodak, AGFA, and Fuji. I can appreciate that the developer took the time to study these and create a one-push system to emulate them, but one shouldn't rely on their accuracy. Like doing a vocal impression of a celebrity, this reduces each film to a caricature where certain features are exaggerated. Still, most are very attractive and can do wonders when paired with a good photo. In addition to the ready-made presets, Film Lab also allows for brightness/contrast/color/sharpness adjustments, making it more of a complete solution for 'fixing' a poor shot.

At $1.99, SwankoLab is an easy purchase. Offering a unique take on photo editing, anyone with an interest in photography would do well to try it out. An additional in-app purchase of $1.99 expands the range of chemicals from eight to 17. Comparing SwankoLab's total cost of ownership to Film Lab's 99c price tag makes the latter sound like a bargain, which it is.

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Buy SwankoLab in the iTunes App Store.

Buy Film Lab in the iTunes App Store.

Price: $1.99
Website: plastiqcamera.com

You can't help but notice that icon. It may not be exactly the same typeface, and red circles on white backgrounds are everywhere if you look hard enough, but it captures the spirit of the Leica logo. And what can a photo app addict do in the face of such a play for his $1.99 but buy it?

Once it's sitting on your home screen, however, Plastiq Camera is not really a Leica anything. Well, the name should have told you as much. This is a toy camera simulator with a full-screen viewfinder – as opposed to a back-of-camera view such as the ones used by Hipstamatic (also $1.99) and the just-released CLASSICtoy (free, with a $0.99 in-app purchase feature unlock) – but that viewfinder finds ways to change depending on the mode. Turn on "Plastiq Vignetting", for example, and you see dark corners superimposed on the live view as you frame your shot. Another setting, "Cinematiq Landscape", restricts your view to a very wide bar. These two preview features are not new, but to my knowledge this is the first time they've found themselves in one place.

Photos can be captured live within the app, or chosen from your camera roll. The emphasis is clearly on the former, using this as an actual camera app. Using the camera roll is buried three-clicks deep in the interface. To that end, Plastiq Camera introduces a novel trick: background processing. After a short delay following a shot, during which the photo is copied into the app's own working space known as the "Darkroom", users may quit the app at any time, or just stay in it until the photos are ready. Processing continues whenever the app is running, and the finished picture is then, and only then, saved to the phone's camera roll. This is actually a good thing because Plastiq's photo processing is painfully slow.

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One of the few iPhone apps that need no introduction, Nevercenter's Camerabag was among the first of its kind on the App Store, and currently enjoys the kind of brand name recognition (amongst iPhone users) reserved in traditional photography for such names as Kodak and Polaroid. If your parents have heard of an iPhone photography app, it's probably Camerabag.

However, it has been my opinion for awhile that the comparisons to Kodak and Polaroid go beyond fame, and into the realm of mediocrity. The app has been largely unchanged since its release – a few new filters have been added, with none of them spectacular, except for "Colorcross" which was added only after it first appeared in the desktop version I will be talking about. As would be expected, the release of Camerabag's iPhone version was followed by a wave of inferior me-too apps, but competitors eventually matured and produced more sophisticated image processing solutions, leaving Nevercenter's creation to coast on its name. Its included filters are by no means poor, but the app's one-time ubiquity gave many of its more distinctive looks (such as Helga and 1974) a played-out and overused feel.

Nevercenter's response came in the form of Camerabag Desktop, a version for Mac and Windows computers, released last September. Its killer features: a button labeled 'Reprocess', which gave its set of effects some much-needed random variation, and a method to easily "stack" effects upon each other to create new mutants. One always had the option of stacking effects on the iPhone by saving and then reopening photos after each filter, but it was a task better suited to stamp collectors and librarians nearing retirement age.

The catch? Camerabag Desktop asked for USD$19, a fortune compared to its mobile relative, which sold for between $0.99 and $2.99, depending on when you visited the App Store. The deal was momentarily sweetened by the addition of Colorcross, a very nice if slightly over-the-top take on the look of crossprocessed film photography. Eventually, Colorcross would find its way to the iPhone version, leaving only the Reprocess and multi-filter stacking features as differentiators.

But I'm leaving out a major point, one that didn't seem so important to me at the time. Having Camerabag on your desktop computer opens it up to use on all the other photos from all your other cameras. iPhoto, Picasa, and Adobe Photoshop Elements are immensely popular amongst casual photographers due to their ease of use, but they're mostly limited to cropping, brightening, and adding rudimentary embellishments like a Gaussian blur for that wedding photo effect (shudder). It strikes me that Camerabag Desktop might be the only application that expands their creative options to the kind of looks that toy photography enthusiasts enjoy.

After learning that owners of the iPhone version enjoy a USD$5 discount on the price of Camerabag Desktop, I decided to bite the bullet. Of late, I've rekindled my feelings for the iPhone version by stacking its effects on top of other apps like Cross Process and TiltShiftGen, and I was eager to get new looks out of the Reprocessing feature.

To put it through its paces, I selected 14 photos from my recent trip to Japan, in particular from a morning visit to the famous Tsukiji fish market. These were shot with a Panasonic LUMIX LX-3 compact camera*, often regarded as one of the best digital cameras in its class. I'd originally processed them with Adobe Lightroom, as is my usual habit for non-iPhone photography. The challenge was to get good, interesting results using just Camerabag Desktop alone. No exposure compensation, no sharpening/straightening, no brightness/contrast/saturation/hue control of any kind.

It took longer than I'd expected, and I learnt that while it's not impossible to use it as the only stop in a processing workflow, you're going to want something else for minor adjustments. I had some photos with strong backlighting that needed shadow recovery, and the only filter in Camerabag Desktop that does an adequate job of brightening while reducing contrast is "Instant", which strives for a washed out look that is also very warm. If you want to brighten scenes while giving them a cool tone, you're out of luck ("Cinema" infuses photos with some cyan, but not nearly enough). There were many times where I wanted to crop something a little, reduce the heavy-handedness of the "Helga" filter's vignette, brighten, and so on, but couldn't.

On the other hand, the act of reprocessing and experimenting with different stacks of effects is lots of fun, and a different approach to desktop photo editing that will appeal to many. Knowing that the next click could bring about a serendipitous, completely unexpected collision of light and color that will never be repeated again, EVER, can stretch the darkroom process out far longer than if you were just adjusting sliders, limited by your own imagination.

Verdict: A worthwhile buy offering good results and having only minor flaws. Most importantly, fun.

Rating: 4 / 5

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Note: This review looked at version 1.0 of Camerabag Desktop. Version 1.1 is on the way, adding the "Silver" filter that is currently an iPhone exclusive, as well as several other unannounced features. One can only hope a slider for adding brightness to difficult scenes is one of them.

* With one exception. The photo of a man standing in the street against the sun was taken with a Sony WX-1.

 

Price: $0.99

Website: www.crossprocessapp.com