Life in LoFi: iPhoneography

ZCam Pro

For a limited time, ZCam Pro and BlueCam Pro by Mother Tucker are available free! Both apps recently sold in the App Store for $0.99 USD.

BlueCam Pro is a remote control camera with Live Camera Preview over Bluetooth. Packed with features such as Full-Screen Camera Preview, a Big Photo Button, Photo Timers, Zoom, Batch and Automatic Photo Uploading, Multi Photo Sharing, Reticles and a Twitter Client.

ZCam Pro is a full-featured camera that shares many of the same features as BlueCam Pro but also adds WiFi control and preview to the mix. It’s a full-featured camera as well.

Life In LoFi hasn’t reviewed or tested either app. If you have, feel free to let us know your thoughts about either or both in the comments below.

Both apps have feature-reduced free versions. These are the full versions being offered for free for a limited time. Grab ‘em quick!

App Store links: BlueCam Pro |  ZCam Pro

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PhotoForge

PhotoForge by GhostBird Software is on sale right now and for a limited time, the price has been reduced to just $0.99 USD — the lowest price I’ve seen it in a while.

Several apps have tried to wear the namesake of “Photoshop for the iPhone” including Photogene and PerfectPhoto. PhotoForge truly is the image editing powerhouse for iPhone. I use both this and Photogene regularly to process my images. If you’re only using Photogene, you are missing out on so much that your iPhone is capable of.

Click here to read our recent review of PhotoForge. Recently, PhotoForge was selling for $2.99 USD. It’s a great app at three bucks and one that I use often. For $0.99, PhotoForge is an essential purchase if you don’t have it already. I’m not sure how long this sale will last, so grab it now before the price goes back up.

App Store link: PhotoForge

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Both Crop Suey and Straighten Image by appingo are free in the App Store right now. Both Life In LoFi and iPhoneography.com recently recommended Straighten Image. Glyn Evans also recommends Crop Suey as well (at this moment, we haven’t reviewed the app yet).

Straighten Image is a no frills, one trick pony app, that lets you quickly and easily realign the horizon, and straighten out any crooked photos. Besides its simplicity, what I like about the app is that it resamples images back to their original pixel dimensions even after it’s shaved a few pixels off the edges. Crop Suey is more full featured. In addition to straightening the image, you can also crop, flip and rotate images.

Recently, both apps sold for $0.99 USD. These are simple, but great utilities. Grab them both now while they’re free.

App Store links: Crop Suey |   Straighten Image

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PhotoSize
Version 1.0

Bottom Line: Essential if you regularly buy photo apps

PhotoSize

PhotoSize by Danny Goodman is a utility that does one thing — it gives you the pixel dimensions of any image from your iPhone’s photo library or camera roll.

Previously, checking this info might involve emailing the image from one of the third-party apps that can email a photo without downsizing it and then opening the image on your computer in Photoshop, or checking the pixel dimensions using Photogene’s Crop tool. With PhotoSize, simply choose an image from your iPhone and PhotoSize quickly and easily tells you the pixel dimensions.

Read the rest of this entry →

Glyn Evans recently reviewed the app Straighten Image by appingo on his blog iPhoneography.com.

I was amazed at just how quick, easy and simple this app was to use, but the most interesting thing, and more importantly omitted from the AppStore description, is the save photos are upscaled, and so on my iPhone 3G, were saved at full-res.  Now I’m not sure if this app saves at full-res on the iPhone 3GS, so if anyone has an iPhone 3GS and this, then maybe they could comment on the resolution.

Read Glyn’s full review here on iPhonoegraphy.com. Read my thoughts below, after the jump.

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Read the rest of this entry →

Auto Adjust

I like free. As an end user, free apps are always good. It’s nicer when the free apps are well done and useful. Auto Adjust is one of those.

Auto Adjust by Joe Macirowski is free for a limited time! This is not a feature-crippled “lite” version, but the full version.

I’ve reviewed Auto Adjust and it’s one of my favorite apps here on LoFi. Unlike many of the “flash fixer” apps available, it’s more than just a flash enhancer which simply brightens images. Auto Adjust uses “contrast stretching” or normalization to help correct exposure. Its adjustable enhancement produces excellent results on many images that would otherwise be lost due to underexposure as well as automatically correcting the contrast of more properly exposed images. Auto Adjust is one of my go-to apps.

This is one of the better exposure enhancement apps available in the App Store. It’s highly recommended at its regular price of $0.99 USD. I think it’s an essential app while it’s free. I’m not sure how long the free offer will last, so if you don’t already have Auto Adjust, grab it now!

App Store link: Auto Adjust

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You just downloaded the latest update of your favorite app to your iPhone, but the new version crashes and the old version is no longer available in the App Store. Are you out of luck until the fix is released? Maybe not. If you downloaded the update on your iPhone only (not in your computer’s iTunes), here’s one way to downgrade back to a previous version of an app.

Read the rest of this entry →

iPhoneographer Dixon Hamby recently posted this to his blog:

If you want to make quality prints from your images, before you buy an iPhone photo app check to see if it saves at 100%. Many of the most popular ones don’t. After you download an app check the settings. Even though the app saves at 100% the default may be less than full resolution. I simply don’t use an app unless it saves at 100%. Why would I want to degrade the image? So if you ever plan to make prints, print calendars or books, check before you buy and save yourself some money.

Editor’s Note: Well said, Dixon. Thanks! Even if you’ve read a review of an app online, it’s always a good idea to read the app’s entire description in iTunes. If it’s mentioned, many times a developer will bury the size of output at the end of a description. Not all online reviews mention an app’s resolution (LifeInLoFi’s policy is to mention image resolution when we find lower than acceptable output. Often we mention the resolution anyway.). If no output resolution is mentioned in the online review you read — either full-size or reduced — check the user reviews in the App Store. Many times, the early reviews will mention low res output.

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Dixon Hamby publishes the blog dixon hamby iphoneography and has given me permission to republish his post here. You can follow Dixon on Twitter, @dixonhamby. You can purchase books of his iPhoneography here.

One of the issues that occasionally pops up for me is that sometimes pictures taken on my iPhone don’t display with their proper rotation in some, non-Apple instances. I encounter this more often with third-party apps, but it still can be an issue. A new post by TJ Luoma over at TUAW — The Unofficial Apple Weblog gives a very interesting, very technical, very geeky way to fix this issue using a utility called jhead. Personally, I prefer to run my images through Photogene on my iPhone, fix any rotation issues and everything is then fine.

This link isn’t presented here so much as a “how-to” but as another peek behind the curtain as to how the iPhone camera works. Note: I’ve found easier and less intrusive ways to fix this issue (see Photogene mention above). If you’re feeling brave, remember that you’re peeking and poking around data. Be sure you know what you’re doing. Always work on a copy of your image. Any time you’re working with the raw code of a file, there’s a chance that you may hose your image.

Apple uses an EXIF tag to rotate images. This can be a problem when you share images with others. Safari will rotate the image correctly, but no other browser will.

Adding to the trouble is that Mail.app and the Finder will also “auto-correct” the rotation, so it can be hard to tell which images need to be “fixed” and which don’t.

Read the full article here at TUAW.com >>>

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Gorillacam

Check the App Store for the great new update of Gorillacam by Joby Inc. The update adds a few great new features to this camera replacement app that we recently reviewed in our Best Free iPhone Camera Replacements article. Best of all, the app is still free.

The version 1.1 update adds anti-shake image stabilization, tap-to-focus for 3GS iPhones, selectable image sizes and a very nice full resolution 4X digital zoom. It’s a great update to an already excellent camera replacement app.

If you don’t already have a camera replacement app, Gorillacam is worth a serious look — even more so after this update.

Gorillacam is still free in the App Store. [link]

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