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.
