New photo app Ripped from Reality creates interesting juxtapositions in your photos. It combines both photographic and pencil sketched elements in your photograph — as if the photograph were “ripped” from the initial sketch of the scene. It’s a pretty cool effect.
The app is on sale now for a limited time for only $0.99 — that’s half off its regular price. It’s not a bad app and worth trying for a buck. Read what I think about it after the jump. >>>
“Ripped from Reality captures and expels you into a surreal world of juxtapositions. Combining the world of photography, the world of sketching, the uniqueness within every wrinkle of paper, and most importantly the exploration into your own imagination. ”
Okay, maybe the App Store description could turn it down a notch, but the app does what it’s supposed to and for the most part does it easily and well.
Shoot or import an image from your camera roll. Draw or lasso and area to be “ripped”. Initial paper color seems to be picked up from random shades in your image and can easily be changed.
The app’s settings let you control all the parameters of the images — paper texture and color, pencil intensity, direction and depth of the the rip shadow. You can also easily reverse the sketched and ripped areas with one click.
Ripped from Reality comes with several rip presets as well for one-click “ripping,” but have fun and make your own rips. Unless you want a big heart or a big rectangle, you’ll probably get better results by playing around. Experiment. The app has an Undo button right at the top.
The rendered images look good. The textures are well-rendered and the rips have the right amount of jagged edges and randomness to look natural.
Ripped from Reality, rip detail
The online help is just that — online. You are taken to Ripped’s web page, and it isn’t formatted for mobile browser, which makes it pretty cumbersome to read an amneuver through. It’s good to try and muddle through it, though. It won’t take long but it’s a good overview of the app’s tools.
I experienced occasional crashing on my recently rebooted iPhone 4S. I usually shoot with another camera app and import into my effects app, so this is an annoyance but not a dealbreaker for me.
Ripped from Reality is a CPU hog and is very slow, especially when processing large, high-res images. I thought my iPhone 4S would go to sleep while saving. On slower iPhones, processing time might be really really long for large images. However, Ripped is chewing on a lot of data while it processes. The effects it creates are well-textured, detailed and great looking! Definitely worth the wait.
Ripped from Reality supports your device’s full resolution — that’s 8 MP on an iPhone 4S. It also supports smaller file size saves for quicker processing. Ripped from Reality “rips out” most EXIF data including geotags, though (sorry…).
Ripped from Reality is easy to use and lets you create great looking effects. It’s a tool to add well-rendered juxtapositions and texture contrasts to your photos. I’d say it was a good app at its regular price of $1.99 despite the understandable slow performance. On sale, I recommend it if you like the sample images and effects. I do not have an old device to test this on, so let us now in the comments below how this performs on an iPhone 3GS. It won’t work on a 3G.
Ripped from Reality is on sale for a limited time for only $0.99 — a savings of $1.00. Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation) and iPad. Requires iOS 4.2 or later.
=M=
~~~~
