Much of my vacation time has been devoted to learning to use my phone
adequately and to continue getting some use from my iPad 1.0. There had been a
thread on photo apps a month or so ago. I guess I have a little to add to the
subject.
It appears that the trend in photo apps is 1) to make it easy to "lomo" your
cellphone pics, and 2) to become your "cloud." I don't want either of these
things, and so my evaluations are colored by that. I was intrigued to stumble
on Photoshop Express, which is free I think because it wants to suck you into
its own cloud structure. Disappointing to me is that the iPad version is
different from the Android version. That is axiomatic, I suppose, but they
have made no attempt to make the two versions work essentially the same or even
to offer all of the same features. PS Express lacks several of the features
that keep me in the PS stable otherwise: highlight/shadow tool is one of the
key ones. Despite offering its own cloud, PS Express works well with my cloud
of choice, Dropbox. I have Dropbox set up so that I have a special email
address to send photos from applications to a special folder. (One of the
apparent limitations of Dropbox is that one can only do file manage
ment such as deleting or moving files from the host computer, not from a
mobile device. I don't know if that is absolute or if I just haven't probed
enough.) I have not yet explored Google Drive, which I will pursue when I get a
Round Tuit, nor Picasa.
Snapseed is now owned by Google and is free, which accounts for its three-star
rating, as it is now slammed in the reviews by people who paid good money for
it a week before Google made it a free app. Otherwise people seem to love it.
It is more oriented to "effects" for the lomo-instagram crowd IMHO. All of
these programs offer to tools to change hue, saturation, brightness, contrast
and work fine for basically unproblematic images. Within Snapseed's "tune
image" menu are most of the controls I am interested in, and I like the
"ambience" control, which is a lot like the controls in LR and Bridge which
enhance and intensify color without ramping up actual saturation. Recommended
if this is all you need.
Filterstorm has the greatest flexibility of all the apps I've tried, but it is
also more complex and has an actual learning curve to use its masks and layers
features. It doesn't work anything like PS on a computer, but it offers more
tools to match it than other apps. Still lacks highlight-shadow correction,
but offers levels and curves tools, which work well, even if they are a little
fiddly. If I could have only one program, it would be this. Bear in mind that
I am the type that prefers PS to LR and have never done a batch correction on a
series of photos in my life. Simplicity and convenience are not the primary
things I am looking for.
Speaking of which, there are some Android apps that get raves, like Camera FX
Zoom. This sort of app is not just for photo manipulation but takes over your
camera operation as well. I am not too interested in this. The Galaxy S3 has
a decent camera. Getting good photos with it is more dependent on technique
than apps IMHO. These apps are useful if you wish to shoot, manipulate, and
then email or text the result right there on the fly. Not my thing.
Finally, it is a challenge to attempt to make the output from iOS apps work
with Android stuff and vice versa. Naturally, Google has done more to make
this possible than Apple, since Google has been catching up and drawing the
public away from Apple. In general, I like the wild and wooly world of Android
as I have the plug and pray mentality of an inveterate Windows user. It would
have been easier just to have gotten an iPhone and stayed in the Apple
ecosystem. My experience makes me appreciate the maturity of Apple in this
area, but I like life outside the hive, so to speak. I am not trying to
instigate a platform fight, but to provide disclosure, as my opinions are
shaped by my eclectic experience and may be worthless both to Apple and Google
partisans alike, assuming they are of any interest to anyone at all.
Joel W.
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