It all started with an article at Wired Magazine about the most popular iPhone apps of 2009. In that I found out about the Photoshop mobile app that is free and superb, like its desktop big brother. I added an account online at photoshop.com that has an interface animated to the guts and fun to watch. All done in Flash. I used to be against Flash because of the way it's been implemented within Web sites (not at all transparent), but I gotta admit, you can do real interface wonders with the tool. Some of the functions they included are related to image editing, and they offer functionality to make you publish your wonders into plenty of Web 2.0 social sites. You could also embed other photographic sites you might own (Flickr, Picasa...). Finally, you can bring your photoshop libraries within your iGoogle portal and into your Blogger or Wordpress blog (see my sidebar). Adobe claims that you can post your shots in their servers not fearing any loss from compression and such! Really!
Enough with the free stuff on iPhone. Let's buy something serious now. Back to the best selling Apps as published by Apple; curious to see, most were about navigation (Belgian store) and photo shooting. Meaning, most of us in Belgium are so freakin' blind that we can't find our way whatsoever, or shoot any descent photographs at all... which is kinda true!
I bought me two of those apps for €1.59 each. Colorsplash, and Genius. Colorsplash helps you select areas of a photograph where you keep the color, whereas the rest is converted to B/W. Had nothing else to test, so I shot my cup of coffee on the tablecloth of ours. After editing the shot with Colorsplash I added a vignette effect with Photostudio, another app I like a lot, with more than 100 filters of which about a dozen are remarkable. Rest is a bit of déjà vu, but, anyways... They also recently updated their app by adding more filters and some interesting taxonomy grouping to ease selections... Admire my photographic "wonder" here -->
Finally Genius is a cool tool that improves camera shooting by adding functionality that iPhone's own Camera app originally missed. Anti-shake, zoom, timer, burst shoot, big button (cool!), sound capture, plus raster guides to better position your subjects and improve your framing. Not only the rule of thirds but also diagonal positions and more cool stuff. Pretty impressive!
Now you know how I spend my Sundays nowadays. Testing cool iPhone apps and blogging about them to share my enthusiasm with the rest of you, buggers.
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