With all the hoopla over PhotoForge2, Snapseed, Filterstorm, Luminance and the other excellent image editors that have recently been released or updated, it’s easy to overlook PhotoWizard-Editor, an iPhone photo app that’s been around for while. Originally released in May 2010, PhotoWizard just got a really great new update and overlooking it would be a huge mistake.
Not only is PhotoWizard a great image editor, it also has a ton of filters and effects as well.
I’ll just quote from its description to illustrate its impressive pro tool set – it has all the necessary ones, including exposure, contrast, saturation, sharpness, shadow/highlight recovery, unsharp mask, gaussian blur, radial blur, motion blur, color balance, histogram auto and manual level, curves, white balance, auto contrast, auto color, color temperature, noise reduction, colorize, channel mixer and others.
In this new version, there are also a ton of effects as well. Filters and effects can be applied selectively with masks. PhotoWizard is one of the few image editors with this feature. You can read the full App Store description below.
The reengineered vignetting feature is nice and it now includes the option for rectangular vignette around the edges of the frame. Again, very few apps have this feature as well. I’d like to see the addition of some sort of transparency in the vignette feature to help lighten up the overlay, but after woring with it, I was able to create good looking vignettes with a good blur and a smooth fade.
Among the new filters, the new Print Shake filter is pretty cool (see the sample image above). The effect splits out color like a misaligned press, but in PhotoWizard, the effect is adjustable.
The improved crop feature works very, very well. It’s responsive and easy to grab. The new side tabs make freehand crops very easy to create. Unlike dragging corners to pull out the edges, the side and top tabs easily let you adjust one edge only.
The user interface is big and functional on the iPhone screen, but a tap toggles full-screen view.
Effects are applied quickly. The app processes them on save, which takes longer on the back end than other photo editors, especially if you’ve applied a lot of filters and effects.
PhotoWizard-Editor supports image sizes of up to 3072×3072 pixels – that’s larger than iPhone 4 full resolution. It strips out most EXIF data from an image, including geotags.
Overall, I was really impressed by the PhotoWizard 3.0 update. This new update brings a combination of features that are found in few other apps. Even if you have another photo editor in your toolbox, the new features in PhotoWizard-Editor 3.0 make it worth a look.
PhotoWizard-Editor is normally $1.99. It’s on sale now for a limited time for only $0.99. Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. It’s old iPhone-friendly and only requires iOS 3.0 or later.
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Here’s the App Store description:
Powerful photo editor for editing your photos on iPhone/iPod.
Either on the full image or selectively apply filters with advanced image masking tools. Mask a portion of an image with a magic touch. Apply any filter to the unmasked portion from a wider range of filter choices. Apply multiple filters to achieve custom effects. For example you can easily create color splash, hue splash, tilt shift etc. just by combining mask and filters.
â— Mask image with magic touch, color, brush, shape, lasso or gradients.
â— More than 100 filters and special effects.
â— Unlimited undo/redo (Swipe left/right on the home screen)
â— Adjust filter parameters according to your liking.
â— Accumulate multiple filters/masks to achieve unique effect.
â— Crop, Straighten, Rotate, Flip with touch.
â— Superimpose part of or the entire image on top of another image and with 18 different blending modes.
â— Add text to your image with any color, font, size and angle.
â— Clone with a flexible brush and vertical and horizontal mirroring.
â— Reduce red-eye on your photos.
â— Blend color gradients to your image.
â— Auto-save session.
â— Resume last session in a fraction of a second.
â— Save, E-Mail, share in Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr.
â— Intuitive UI design.
â— High resolution export.
â— 15 Video tutorials.
â— Instructions.
â— iPhone 4 ready (Retina Display and 5MP image export)
â— And all that with a super fast processing speed!
In the collection of filters you will find all necessary filters like exposure, contrast, saturation, sharpness, shadow/highlight recovery, add light, unsharp mask, gaussian blur, radial blur, motion blur, color balance, histogram auto and manual level, curves, high dynamic range, white balance, auto contrast, auto color, color temperature, noise reduction, colorize, soft focus, sepia, channel mixer etc.
In effects, you will find numerous tunable effects falling into many genres like photographic, distortion, artistic etc.
You can terminate the picture editor any time you want and come back later and resume last session where you ended, with all undo, redo levels and the mask.
What’s New in Version 3.0
✔ 50 new filters and effects, find them under…
â— Motion Blur
â— Radial Blur
â— Shadows/Highlights (Add Light)
â— Light Leak
â— Light Bokeh
â— Texturize
â— Color Presets
â— Gray Presets
â— Print Shake
✔ Reimplemented vignette with a new blur based algorithm.
✔ Added rectangular vignette.
✔ Improved GameBoy Camera effect.
✔ The toolbars do not hide the photo any more.
✔ Added 16:9 and 9:16 fixed crop ratios.
✔ Crop rectangle now can be adjusted from sides also.
✔ In curve processor, you can now see all other channel’s curves partially while working on one particular channel.
✔ UI Improvements.
✔ Masking bugs fixed.
✔ Other minor bug fixes.
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