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

Percolator
Version 1.0
Price: $0.99

Bottom Line: Easy to use, Percolator is a fun, modernist app that produces unique colorful effects.

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Many excellent iPhone photo apps simulate the look of retro and vintage analog photography. Percolator is a new photo app from Tinrocket that takes a different direction and makes your iPhone photos look like a mosaic comprised of circles. It’s a very Modernist app like colorShadow, PhotoTropedelic, and Chromocam Dots — producing an image that could only be easily created by a computer (or very meticulously hand-drawn). I doubt modernist apps like Percolator will change the direction of iPhoneography, but it’s a very pleasant diversion.

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Some random thoughts and a short review. Not enough for full blog posts, but each warrants some level of discussion. A Thursday edition of Musings….

• I love my new iPhone 4. Its greatness transcends the cellphone suck that is AT&T in my neighborhood (making calls downstairs is an exercise in dropped calls — more bars in more places, except my house). I’ve had it almost one week and I’ve made phone calls, run apps, edited images, tested a lot of apps, checked in on Foursquare, downloaded data. All throughout, the new phone has shined. The only thing I really haven’t done yet is to go on a shoot with my new camera. I’ve taken snapshots… and they’re gorgeous. I want to see what this phone has behind the lens. I really want to take Four out for a shoot.
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  ColorShadow screenshot

  ColorShadow [App Store link] by Hokuson is a pretty cool app. Colorshadow is an app that does variations of one effect, but does it very well. Basically, it converts your image to a stark monochrome and then layers a color gradient over the parts of the image that aren’t white. Because of the stark contrast, it works best when your source image has a simple background that contrasts from the subject. The effects are retro in an early ’70′s Ironside or a ’90′s original iPod commercial kind of way. It’s not a camera — doesn’t even give you the option. It loads images from your camera roll and saves them out at up to your iPhone’s full resolution (including 5MP on the iPhone 4) or a smaller webready size — nice! It’s really easy to use. The effect is very retro and kinda funky. ColorShadow is a good app. I like it. It’s $1.99 in the App Store.
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• If you upgraded your iPhone this time, what do you plan to do with your old iPhone? I’m keeping mine as a spare camera…. I’m keeping my old 2G for those times when I want to shoot digital lofi, not app lofi into my images. The new iPhone 4 camera is really nice. It has excellent clarity, fantastic color and saturation, and a lot less noise than the older cameras. It improves on all the image qualities that made the older iPhones unique — the noise, the color, the overall tint and saturation. The new iPhone 4 is almost a real camera. Its pictures are bright and crisp without needing to run them through a DRC app first. The old iPhone 2G and 3G are true digital “toy” cameras. As mobile phone cameras improve, I suspect that the old iPhones’ value as digital toy cameras — both monetarily and from a iPhoneography standpoint — will only increase and become sought after.
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June 30, 2010 — Just two big photo app updates today. The TiltShift Generator update has some nice iPhone 4 compatibility. Picture Show got a ton of new filters, an enhanced GUI, some iOS 4 bug fixes, but it’s still 2MP output.

Yesterday, CameraKit was updated to version 1.9 and now takes advantage of full iPhone 4 resolutions.

Updates for the Classic Camera series from misskiwi have been submitted to the App Store, but haven’t been released yet. And the Hipstamatic 160 update that adds new features and fixes the issue with the monochrome films was submitted on Monday, but we didn’t see that one today either.

We’ve added several other apps to the list as well, including the new app colorShadow.

Go to Life In LoFi’s iPhone 4 Photo App Compatibility Page to see our entire list of photo apps and how well they work on the iPhone 4.

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