CameraKit

CameraKit

CameraKit by Tetsuya Chiba is on sale for $0.99 USD for a limited time — that’s 50% off. Even at its regular price, this is a worthwhile purchase.

CameraKit is a camera and post-processing app that acts almost as a digital darkroom on your iPhone. You can load images from your iPhone’s entire photo library, which is how I use it. None of its features are unique, but here they are nicely packaged, well implemented, simple to use, and make it easy to experiment.

Color-wise, choose from one of four “film” settings — standard Color, a good Black & White, a Sepia with good saturation, tone and contrast, and a nice, aged, washed out Classic color. Film stocks are for color only. No simulated film grain is added. That would be a nice feature to add in a future update.

The vignetting is among the better ones I’ve tried. There’s a nice, smooth, natural gradation — a good fade to the vignette. It’s comparable to some of CameraBag’s filters. I’ve found the vingettes in many other apps tend to look a little harsh or mechanical. The Flash lighting effect is center-focused. It’s like an anti-vignette. It’s more for effect than for adjusting the overall exposure of the image. The area of the flash reminds me of a standard, hot-shoe mounted flash.

You can adjust the levels of soft focus or blur. You can perform digital cross-processing — a filter that simulates the processing of a type of color film in a chemical solution intended for another type of film. This basically adds red, green, blue or yellow hues to your image. The Push/Pull Processing filters really do a good job of simulating over- or under-developing film. I use these filters often to tweak the color of my images.

Settings are retained until you change them, making it easy to apply the same effects to multiple images. The app can save in full-resolution, including full size iPhone 3GS images.

I find myself using this app a lot to make natural-looking vignettes and quick and easy post-processing color moves. It’s a good app to have in your toolbox. If it’s not already in yours, grab it now … especially while it’s on sale for $0.99 USD.

App Store link: CameraKit

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