Lumiere creates stunning vintage-looking photographs in a variety of styles. One of the cool features of Lumiere is the live onscreen preview as you shoot.
nebulus design, the app’s developer, are pretty responsive to user requests. The new 1.3 update includes a couple of user-requested new features. This update has a few quirks, though. Read past the jump to find out more.
Lumiere started off life as an effects camera. You can read my review of version 1.1 here.
There are no new frames or effects in the new 1.3 update, but there are a few cool new features. The best and most useful of the new features is the ability to import photos from your iPhone’s photo library. It’s a great feature as it not only allows you to shoot and tweak images with other apps before applying Lumiere’s magic, but now you can apply Lumiere’s lush effects to any photo on your iPhone.
Lumiere now also supports hardware flash on iDevices that have it — another user-requested feature. It’s controlled with a convenient onscreen toggle.
Auto-save to the iPhone’s camera roll is now supported. It’s turned off by default. Open the settings panel to switch it on.
There are a few quirks and glitches with this update. “Import from Camera Roll” is oddly nested in the settings button onscreen. Once you know where to look, it’s not inconvenient. It’s just not placed in a standard configuration, onscreen position and the first time or so gets a little confusing searching for it.
The Auto-save to camera roll is a great, handy feature, but comes with a bug and still needs some work. The app still saves to its own internal lightbox, but images that were also auto-saved to the camera roll only saved at 3.2 MP resolution on my iPhone 4. It saved at the lower resolution no matter what the quality setting is in the app.
Here’s the workaround until this is fixed. Images in the lightbox are full res and resaving or sharing them from there produced full 5 MP files. I’ve turned off Auto-save until this is fixed.
Although there are plenty of vintage and old photo apps available, Lumiere is unique with its live preview and the richness, saturation, texture and quality of rendered effects.
Lumiere is $1.99 in the App Store. Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod touch (4th generation), iPad 2 Wi-Fi, and iPad 2 Wi-Fi + 3G. Requires iOS 4.2 or later.
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