If you’ll visit my photoblog you’ll see that I like taking photos. The only problem is that I cannot carry everywhere my DSLR camera (I think it’s obvious why) and then I have to take advantage of my iPhone’s camera. I have also a pocket camera, but to be honest the iPhone camera is better. Now, don’t expect that you’ll have the same quality and features with an iPhone like with your DSLR, but there are some things you can do to reach a decent quality.
Beside the well-know advices (e.g. shoot in good like, frame correctly, avoid shaking and so on…) when it comes to iPhone it’s also important the apps that you’re using to achieve some tasks. In this case photography. Please remember that this is my personal workflow that I’m sharing with you. I don’t sustain that it’s the best one or the apps that I’m using are the most fine ones. I’m sure that there are some other good tools out there, but this is working for me and I hope will work for you.
Let’s proceed.
The build in apps for taking pictures in iPhone is a pretty decent one. But I’ve found some alternatives that are excellent. Not all are free, but still the prices are acceptable.
Camera+ is one of the best apps for iPhone’s camera. Great usability and a lot of features like:
- Touch Exposure & Focus
- Scene modes and flash
- Crops let you frame your pics perfectly
- Dozens of amazing effects
just to remember a couple of them. The most useful feature for me is the Touch Exposure and Focus. This will let you focus on something (e.g. like a flower), but drag the Exposure on an area where the luminosity is best for your photo (like you see in the second screenshot above). With this feature you obtain clear and sharp photos with good exposure. The price is also acceptable (99$ cents at the time when this article was posted)
ProCamera is my 2nd choice, not because it’s worst than Camera+ but due to the fact that I got good with Camera+ and I have a better feeling using it. I think it’s a matter of “getting used to…”
ProCamera incorporates state-of-the-art technologies to let you capture stunning photos and videos with your iPhone. Any tool is as powerful as its handling. ProCamera meets this requirement by giving you intuitive and fast control over all of its features:
- antishake
- self-timer
- virtual horizon and grids
- rapidfire burst
A little bit more expensive (2.99$) than Camera+, ProCamera is something to consider as well for taking your photos.
I use this two applications and I think it’s enough. Let’s go to the next step.
No matter how good the camera is (even with DSLR ones) a little bit of photography post processing is helpful and may add the spark that every image needs. Here I have also two apps that I use frequently.
Up to now, I couldn’t found anything to beat this apps for iPhone. The number of features here is amazing and it can be compare with a software developed for post processing photos on Mac. Something like Acorn or Pixelmator. Filterstorm has a lot of features. And I mean a lot:
- Ability to apply adjustments to entire image, by brush, gradient, color range, vignette, or selecting opacity.
- Send images via Email, FTP, Flickr, and Dropbox
- Export images up to 22MP (iPad2) or 7.5MP (iPad/iPhone 4)
- Save edits as automations to apply to other images
- Curves: Luminance, RGB, Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow
- Adjust brush size, softness, and opacity
- Brightness
- Contrast
- Color balance
- White point picker
- Temperature
- Saturation
- Text tool
- Black and white fine-tuning
- 30-step Visual History
- Cropping, with the ability to specify aspect ratio
- Scaling/Scale to Fit
- Rotation & Image Straightening
- Add Borders
- Combine multiple exposures
- Vignetting
- Sharpen
- Tone map (Simulated HDR)
- Blur
- Noise reduction
- Add noise
- Clone Tool
- EXIF support for JPEG and some RAWs
- IPTC support: For a full list of supported metadata tags
This is one of the most expensive apps that I have, but I don’t regret the money spend. When I say “expensive” I mean compared to free ones. The price is 3.99$ (a little bit cheaper than a BigMac at McDonalds here where I live), but it worth every cent.
If you look at the screenshots above and then you download and see something slightly different, don’t worry, you just have the new version. I didn’t updated mine.
I think you figure it already that PS is coming from Photoshop. This is my second alternative to Filterstorm. Even if I’m a big fan of Photoshop, this Express version is offering less features than Filterstorm. Still everything comes with a price and the price for PS Express is unbeatable: FREE
Features:
- Basics: Crop, Straighten, Rotate, and Flip
- Color: Exposure, Saturation, Tint, Black and White, and Contrast
- Filters: Sketch, Soft Focus, and Sharpen
- Effects: Vibrant, Pop, Border, Vignette Blur, Warm Vintage, Rainbow, White Glow, and Soft Black and White
- Borders: Rectangle, Rounded, Oval, Soft Edge, Vignette, Rough Edge, Halftone, and Film Emulsion
Giving the fact that it’s free, I would consider it for my iPhone photo apps collection
The last thing to do is to spread your work out there.
Skipping Facebook, Google, Yahoo social networks (which are not actually photo albums) I use to expose my photos in three places: My photoblog, Picasa Album and Flickr. For my photoblog I use mostly DSLR photos (you can imagine why) and I upload them manually. For Picasa and Flickr I add some of my best mobile photos using the following applications on my iPhone:
There is not too much to say here. You can upload, share, edit, tag your photos or check images from other people on Flickr. It has decent features that allow me to do my tasks on Flickr without my Mac. By the way, this application is FREE as the majority of those offered by social networks.
This is the application that I use to upload and manage my Picasa albums from iPhone. It’s not officially supported by Google, but (I’m not very sure of this) I remember that I couldn’t find any official apps for Picasa. This one was the best that I could find and it’s doing a great job.
For a FREE apps this one has a great amount of features:
- Multiple Picasa accounts
- Create and delete albums
- Share album links via email
- Create and delete photos
- Batch upload
- Slide show
- Passcode lock
- Tag editing and browsing
- EXIF available
- Send photos via email or save photos in your library
- Favorite photos
- Sort option for album & photo list (can be set in separate by album)
- Search photos in cache
- Quality set for photos to be dowloaded/uploaded
- Account filter for albums
- High-res options for iPhone4/iPod 4th gen
- Map view based on photo’s geotag
- Album and photo property editing
This is my workflow and the apps that I use on iPhone. Following this steps should bring you in front of an acceptable photo. If you have any better apps or some tips for workflow, please add them in comments and I’ll feature them in one of my next posts.
