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

email low-res images from your photo library (click to enlarge and unobscure)

On that occasion where you find yourself with a great photo taken with an app that outputs at super low resolution like the 320×480 apps, you’re not completely out of luck. Your iPhone can do a little magic, resizing images to give tiny photos a few more pixels.

Simply email the image to yourself from your iPhone’s camera roll using the share button in the lower lefthand corner of the screen. Before it emails the image, your iPhone resamples a 320×480 pixel image to 533×800 pixels. Popular app Polarize’s 450×520 resolution gets a boost to a more usable 681×800 when you email the photos from your photo library. Now, instead of postage stamp-sized photos, your images are suitable for uploading to Facebook, Flickr, and even suitable for printing at smaller sizes.

Image upsampling isn’t an ideal solution to having the pixels there in the first place — image quality won’t be as sharp as an photo that should have been saved in high resolution in the first place — but it can make the difference between a super low-res image and one that’s now suitable for a variety of uses.

=M=

~~~~

Previous Life In LoFi Technique links:

Life In LoFi: Technique: How to Edit Images on an iPhone: Adjust Your “Gamma”

Life In LoFi: Technique: Taking clearer pictures

Recently I posted a rant about my frustration with the glut of low-res apps that are hitting the Photography section of the App Store. There were many excellent comments on the post, including several from developers. In case you missed some of the newer ones (or just gave up because of LoFi’s wonky .css for comments that doesn’t allow the margin tag), below I’ve reposted some highlights from comments that were written by app developers. I used the nicks they provided in the comments.

Read the rest of this entry →

This is all you get. Full-size output from one of the recent super-low res camera apps (300x400 pixels)

Another day, another super-low-res monochrome camera is released in the App Store.

With the number of monochrome camera apps that save at the iPhone’s full resolution — Vint B&W, Spica SuperMonochrome, and others — and the number of apps that do an excellent job of converting images to monochrome — CameraBag, MonoPhix, CameraKit — I don’t understand why it’s suddenly become so difficult to produce apps that save to at least 1200×1600 resolution.

One of my biggest peeves in the App Store is the recent glut of super-low-res photo apps. These are the apps that save images at 320×480 pixels (or less) — the iPhone’s screen resolution. Seriously, that’s 0.154 megapixels. The original VGA resolution from the late 1980′s was 640×480 pixels.

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.

~~~~

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.