Life in LoFi: iPhoneography | iPhone Photo News, Showcases, App Reviews

We’re back! I didn’t think we’d be gone this long, but life — day to day life — has a way of creeping in. We were in Hawai’i for a week. I got some decent photos that I’ll be displaying here soon. Once back, I ended up using much more of my available time finishing up a color-correcting project for my day job, Type A Design. It would have been really cool if I could have done some of this color correction on my iPhone in PhotoForge — the app has the tools to handle it. That would have made a great story…!

Anyway, we’re back. I’ve got a long list of reviews to post, images to show and links to share. Enough gabbin’. Back to work….

As always, thank you for stopping by.

=M=

Auto Adjust

One of my favorite exposure enhancement apps, AutoAdjust, has just been updated to version 2.0. The new version features mostly performance enhancements, including better preview rendering, more intuitive sliders, and an improved gamma adjustment.

Not all exposure enhancement or “flash enhancement” apps work the same on the same image. An image that still looks bad with one app may be usable when fixed with another. I keep several exposure enhancement apps on my iPhone for that reason. AutoAdjust is one of them.

AutoAdjust works great with many underexposed images, as well as adding just the right amount of punch and contrast to a decent looking image. Highly recommended!

I have several promo codes for AutoAdjust 2 in the app store. They only work in the U.S. App Store. I’ll send one promo code to each of the first several readers who request one in this post’s comments — one code per reader, please. Be sure to include an email address somewhere in your post for me to send it to. Don’t forget to leave feedback in the App Store.

App Store link: AutoAdjust 2

I’d like to thank the developer, Joe Macirowski, for giving us the promo codes.

Aloha from Waikiki! I’ve got a lot of things to catch up on during the flight back to Texas tomorrow, but here’s a quick bit of news.

The free exposure-enhancing app from Neurigen Corp. Zipix Lite is now called Color Leap. In addition to the crop feature, this new update also adds Sharpening and Noise Reduction, which is especially helpful when you take underexposed pictures.

Zipix Lite has long been one of my favorite free exposure enhancers. There are very few freebie apps that do as good a job in nicely adding brightness to an underexposed image. I think Zipix Lite/Color Leap does a better job than most of the brightening apps that you have to pay for.

Neurigen have been indicating that they’ll charge for this app, and if the new features work as well as the exposure enhancement, Color Leap will still be worth a dollar or two. I haven’t had a chance to see how the new filters work yet, but this free app is an essential grab just for the exposure enhancement alone. Get it while it’s still free.

=M=

MonoPhix
Version 2.0

Bottom Line: Highly Recommended

MonoPhix 2.0 by UIC Phoenxsoftware is a very nice and much improved update to the previous versions. In addition to two new filters, the monochrome conversion filter has been completely retooled to produce much more adjustable, much better results.

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RetroCamera
Version 1.0

Bottom Line: possibly the best set of filters I’ve seen in an app so far, but hampered by low-res output.

RetroCamera

Months ago, a video of the beta for RetroCamera by CLBITZ Ubiquitous Communications Inc. appeared on The iPhoneography Blog. The video demonstrated cool filter after cool filter. We all drooled and we all let out a collective “I want this app now! This app exceeds the promise of that demonstration in many ways and disappoints in one, very huge way — the output resolution of the images it saves is no greater than 320 x 480.

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Flash Camera +

Flash Camera+
Version 1.0

Bottom Line: Avoid.

Very few apps I purchase move me to anger as much as Flash Camera+ by BlueOnionSoft does. This is a horrible, horrible app. It’s part of the developer’s “Camera+” series and I can’t help but think that the other apps in this series, which include Zoom Camera+, Night Camera+ and HDR Camera+ are just as bad.

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