Life in LoFi: iPhoneography

Updated August 11, 2010

I have a camera. Sometimes I use it to make phone calls.

After retiring my trusty lo-fi iPhone 2G, the camera that’s with me nearly all the time is my iPhone 4.

One of the features that makes the iPhone camera unique is the availability of thousands of photography-related apps. For less than the cost of a DVD, you can basically get a whole new camera experience. I don’t use one app exclusively to shoot with. I have several and try to match up the image with the app.

iPhone apps are constantly being created, updated and improved. Since I first wrote my original Camera Bag post (check out the original November 2009 post and the January 2010 update), some apps have fallen by the development wayside, failing to keep up with the hardware advances of the new iPhones. Other new apps have been released, and many apps have been improved to the point where they have leapfrogged ahead as far as functionality and performance.

I find myself shooting with many different apps than the first time I wrote about my iPhone’s camera bag, including on occasion many apps that aren’t listed here. Here’s my newly updated toolbox. With 14 apps, it’s the biggest Camera Bag list I’ve written.

These are the go-to apps I’m currently using.

1. Camera

That’s right… Apple’s built-in Camera app. With the iPhone 4 and iOS 4, it’s really hard not to use the app. It’s simple, easy and fast. On a 4, it’s the fastest camera app available with greatly improved “reload” times. The new 5x zoom works by magic. Although it is a digital zoom and not as good as an optical zoom, Camera uses a great algorithm that helps maintain sharpness even at high zoom factors, without many of the artifacts or fuzziness of other apps’ digital zooms. It’s one of the clearest zooms available on the iPhone.

2. Camera+

This is a full-featured camera replacement that works great on any iPhone. The interface is simple and uncluttered, but the app is well-thought out and powerful. The app features a good digital zoom for all iPhones. The viewfinder features rule-of-thirds guide lines to help with composition. The is an anti-shake stabilizer which waits until your hands are steady before releasing the shutter, helping to minimize blur and create sharper images.

Camera+ is fast — among the quickest reload times of any photo app. It’s got the most well thought out lightbox of any photo app. Once an image is synced to the iPhone’s camera roll, it’s deleted from the app’s lightbox, helping to reduce image clutter. Speed, features, interface — Camera+ is currently my go-to camera replacement app.

3. Hipstamatic

HipstaPrints are all over the place, but I still love this app. Hipstamatic gorgeously recreates the look of stressed, vintage, analog film complete with noise, digital light leaks, smears and vignettes. It  really does a great job recreating the imperfections of a toy camera. It’s a fun camera to shoot with. It feels analog. It’s the experience of an old camera shooting within an iPhone and along the way, it creates some stunning photographs.

4. Vint B&W

An overlooked gem of an app. Vint B&W is a simple black & white camera app for your iPhone. It creates some of the best black & white images on the iPhone. It’s especially nice in the 3/4 tones and shadows, where it produces less noise and fewer artifacts than other apps.

These are the apps that I use most often for post-processing:

5. Perfectly Clear

Fast, easy Dynamic Range Correction (DRC). I usually run my images through Perfectly Clear before doing anything else to them. One-button image scrubbing — improves the sharpness, exposure, saturation and contrast. Although the images from the iPhone 4 are much better than older iPhones, I still use Perfectly Clear often to help quickly improve images that may need a little help.

6. Photogene

A great app for tweaking color, saturation, brightness as well as cropping and straightening an image. I use Photogene for about 75% of my basic processing because it does what I need it to most of the time and it does it quickly and easily. When I need more, there’s…

7. PhotoForge

Big and powerful. Loaded with filters and effects, and it can edit RGB images in a CMYK color space — something Photoshop doesn’t even do. The downside is that it’s slower than Photogene. The upside, it does a lot more. I have both on my iPhone and use them. If I had to choose only one, I’d get PhotoForge to do some serious work.

8. Crop Suey

A crop, rotation and straighten tool. It’s fast and easy cropping. Although apps like Photogene and PhotoForge have similar crop and rotation tools, Crop Suey is the only app that uses resolution enhancement when straightening apps. Instead of reducing the trim size of an image after a 1.2 degree straighten, Crop Suey replaces data. A 5MP image stays a 5MP image after straightening.

9. CameraBag

One of the first iPhoneography filter apps and definitely a classic. A nice set of filters that add mood and texture quickly and easily. There are a lot of nice filters here. Lately my faves are the Helga and Lolo filters. Helga is their implementation of the classic Holga lo-fi camera, complete with desaturated colors and a subtle vignette. Lolo supersaturates your colors and adds a nice, plain, white border for one of the better Lomo effects. All of CameraBag’s filters are classic lo-fi.

10. MonoPhix
Converts color images to monochrome. Makes photos look like they were shot with a very fast black & white film.  Separate sliders for light shades and dark really fine tune the look of the conversion. MonoPhix is stable and creates great black & white images.

11. FILM LAB

An incredible app. FILM LAB is a collection of filters that applies the color, shade and tonal characteristics of hundreds of current and past analog films to your images. The app now has hundreds of filters and the film recreations are amazingly accurate and pretty close to their analog counterparts. For photos that look like they were shot on high-speed Ilford monochrome film, the warm, saturated colors of the Kodachrome family or a bunch of film stocks you may have never heard of, FILM LAB is an essential app.

12. Photo fx

I use it to add film grain to images I’ve processed in FILM LAB, but Photo fx has dozens of other great, well-rendered effects. It’s an impressive set of filters, many not found in other apps. Photo fx contains lens effects, light effects, natural looking analog film recreations, among many other effects. Photo fx is full of great filters that add gentle blur, color effects, the tint and texture of vintage films, or the distortion of a wide angle lens. And there’s little “fluff” in the filter set.

13. TiltShift Generator

More than just an app to apply a TiltShift for a toy effect, it’s a great app to create shallow depth-of-field in an image or to apply a focus effect  – better than any other tiltshift apps. It also adds really nice saturation and contrast to an image.

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Your camera bag will probably look a lot different than mine and there are new apps being released all the time that push the envelope of what you can do creatively on the iPhone. Find what works best for you and have fun!

Unless indicated, nearly every image you see on this site has been shot with my iPhone and processed on my iPhone with one or more of the above apps.

=M=

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