blogbykris

Third-party photography applications for the iPhone/iPod Touch are on the rise with nearly 5 pages of applications showing up in Apple’s Itunes App store. To sift through every app to find the perfect jem to add to our digital camera bag can be a painstaking process , often causing the user to want the $1.99 or so spent back to spend on something more worthwhile.  The recommendations below are geared to unveil some of the best photography apps (as well as some of my personal fav’s), ranging from Flickr utilities, as well as image editing, Geo-tagging & enhancing applications alike.

1. Pano – $2.99 -  As touched upon in an earlier post, Pano is one of my all-time favorite photography apps for the iPhone.  Using a semi-transparent guide, Pano allows the user to almost perfectly seam and blend a collection of up to 6 images to easily make one larger image.  Pano’s color matching algorithm and “highly advanced alignment” build an image of up to 3100 x 600 pixels and hides seams until blown up to about 250% in a Photoshop type application.  Recently updated, Pano now allows for not only landscape portraits, but now also vertical panorama’s.

2. Darkslide – Free/$3.99 – As a daily Flickr user, finding the perfect app to help meet my needs seemed like a test, until I discovered Darkslide (formerly, “Exposure”).  Darkslide brings nearly every aspect of Flickr right to one’s fingertips in a simple, yet clean, UI.  One of the most popular features of Flickr is the “Explore” section, where the most “interesting” 500 pictures of the previous day are posted.  Darkslide allows one to navigate Explore, giving the ability to add pictures to their favorites and comment.  There is also a Contact section where one can view their contact’s uploads, and a Near Me area where the iPhone finds photos taken near its current location thanks to the GPS functionality.  Offering the ability to upload right to one’s photostream and so much more, Darkslide is a must have!  Read my earlier, full review here.

3. Camera Bag – $.99/2.99 -  When it comes to finding an app that allows you to edit and enhance pictures taken from the iPhone or camera roll, look no further.  Camera Bag does exactly what you think it would; brings digital camera bag accessories to your on-the-run photos.  Using a completely simple and elegant UI, Camera Bag brings a handful of filters to the table, ranging from Helga, 1974, Fisheye, Mono, and Cinema to name a few.  Also included are border effects, cropping, image size, the ability to e-mail finalized photos via e-mail, and so much more.  The $.99 version includes only three filters: 1962, 1974, & 1983, while spending $2.99 gets you the full version.

4. Hicon – Free/$.99 -  On the surface, HiCon may blend in with many of the other iPhone photography apps.  But when finally unveiled, HiCon offers a small variety of very powerful tools.  HiCon is a multi-threaded image processing application that takes photos and creates high contrast color and black & white images.  The secret of HiCon is that it will “blow out” color images to give them an ISO 1600/high contrast look, and will also flatten black & white images to give them a monochromatic effect.

5. iMarkMySpot – $.99 – IMarkMySpot does exactly what it says: logs GPS waypoints and time stamps for digital photographers.  After a long day of shooting, IMarkMySpot matches it’s information with any Digital Camera’s EXIF data to create exact GPS coordinates.  After marking a few locations, the user can e-mail & download the GPX file, which is compatible with almost every photography and mapping package.  I, myself, have a Nikon D90 which has the ability to capture GPS coordinates.  The only catch is that I have to invest in the GP-1 GPS Device, which is a $210 setback.  Truly the first & only app of it’s kind, iMarkMySpot is a unique must have for any DSLR user without a geotagging device for their camera!

6. PhotoFX – Free/$2.99 – Thanks to @davidnoelte on Twitter, I was just introduced to this app.  PhotoFX takes optimization and enhancing of photos to a new level.  Comprised of 26 effects in all, PhotoFX brings Black&White, BlackPro-Mist, ColorGrad, Day For Night, High Contrast, Pencil and many other great enhancements to the table.  PhotoFX also uses the iPhone/iPod Touch accelerometer by allowing the user to shake the device to apply a random effect to their current image.  Using award winning Tiffen glass filters, PhotoFX allows more advanced image editing that is based around a beautiful UI and slider-based system.