So I’ve been playing with Apple’s iPad recently and have come to the conclusion that the it’s a great tool for photographers. You have a multitude of things you can do on it from using it as a digital frame, to editing your photos, to displaying images to your clients or potential clients. For those reasons I have started looking into some of the great apps available to you as a photographer on the iPad.
Today I spent some time with Photogene for iPad which as of this writing is the top grossing and top selling Photography based app available for the iPad. This is the photoshop of the iPad, you have plenty of editing options including cropping, straightening, macros and filters, curves and levels, color adjustments and borders. As you can tell from this list this app does a ton of things and from my testing it does most of them very well. The biggest question I had for any photo editing app on the iPad is why would someone want to edit on this instead of their computer?
Lets start off with the first screen, you load the app and are brought to the Photo Albums drop down, from here you can select once of the images you have already stored on your iPad. Since the iPad does not have a camera you can’t take any pictures so you have to use photos you’ve loaded on or can download to edit. Once you’ve selected your image you’ll get your image fullscreen with tools top and bottom of the screen, the layout works great, you’ve got setting and sharing buttons on the top and editing buttons on the bottom.
From left to right -
- Cropping
- Straightening and rotating
- Macros
- Filters
- Color Adjust
- Curves
- Symbols
- Boarders
The cropping tool has alot of great features, on the right side of the screen you can select an aspect ration to conform to when setting up your crop. They have quite a few to choose from including 1:1, 2:3, 3:2, 3:4, 4:3, 16:9 and free form. One of the things I wish they had here was the ability to set a specific pixel size here, they do offer a live pixel size as you move the crop tool but it would have been great to just be able to input a size.
The macro and filters sections to me seem pretty close to each other, they are predefined looks that get applied to your photos. They have some cool options here and some that just go over the top and will probably never be used. For example the Psychodelica macro and B&W filter are just so over the top that it’s more or less unusable but the 40′s Vintage and Noir have a pleasing if not slightly overdone feel. There is also the ability to adjust the filters to your linking and save them for later use which is a great option.
Color adjust is a great panel for adjust all the different aspects of your shot from exposure, highlights, shadows, Saturation and Color Temperature. All of those options are sliders that adjust in near real time to allow you to see the changes as you make them. You also have levels and RGB adjustments on this page both of which are great additions to this app and work in the same way they do in Photoshop. Overall a well designed screen and powerful tools.
Curves work just like they do in photoshop, you can grab the curve adjustment line and move it top up or down to adjust the image. You can also grab a second and third point on the curves line to create new adjustment points. Overall a powerful tool both in photoshop or in photogene.
With the boarders screen you can easily add a cool border to your images from a simple rounded corner to a film strip or scotch tape. It’s a fun option and you can create some pretty fun effects via a very simple interface. A few of the other features I wanted to bring attention to were the sharing features, you can link the app to your Facebook account or your Twitter account and upload directly from the app. You can also copy the modified image to your clipboard for use in other applications or send it directly to email.
All in all Photogene for iPad is a great photo editing app with some high power tools and some cool filter and effect options. If you plan on doing any editing work on your iPad this is a great app to use, will it replace photoshop lightroom/for your main editor, no but can it supplant them for editing when your in a bind or just want to get away from your desk most likely yes.
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