Cropster
Version 1.0
Price: $0.99
Bottom Line: Despite its unique image resampling feature, its limited tool set and extremely poor image quality make Cropster one to avoid.
When shooting raw, I like to shoot just a little bit wide. It’s much easier to crop pixels out than to wish you had more in the first place. A good cropping utility, whether a standalone or as part of an image editing app, is a pretty valuable tool for an iPhoneographer to have.
Cropster by iTankster.com claims it’s “the easiest and fastest way to crop, rotate, resize or flip your photos without compromising with quality of photo.” Which would be great, except (along with other issues) Cropster really compromises the image quality of your photo.
I downloaded the free version of Cropster while it was briefly available in the App Store this weekend. I was intrigued by a few of the features and from there, I purchased the full version.
There are plenty of cropping utilities available, paid and free. The one I use most often is Crop Suey. Its “straighten” feature is unique in that it resamples rotated images back up to full resolution. Cropster promises to resample your entire cropped image back to high resolution, losing very few pixels. This is the feature that intrigued me the most.
Cropster’s biggest problem is the quality of the image. It doesn’t compromise the quality of a photo — it hoses it, saving the image with huge, chunky pixelization, even with a minimal crop. It looks like Cropster doesn’t save the image itself, but saves a resampled low-res screenshot. See below for samples.
How Cropster compromises image quality
In the above enlargements, the image on the left was cropped and saved by Crop Suey. The final image size was only about 1 MP, so it was cropped down pretty tight. The image on the right had a similar crop, but was cropped and saved using Cropster. Distortion and pixeliation are very visible.
The saved images also have horrible distortion to the aspect ratio, with huge horizontal or vertical distortions. It doesn’t preserve the aspect ratio at all. In the above samples, the aspect ratio distortions are visible along with the original crop. The nearly-square crop is way off in the finished image.
The feature set is basic — crop, rotate, flip — with none of the advanced cripping tools of other commercial cropping apps. The crop tool doesn’t have standard aspect ratio locks, only three fairly useless percentages. The crop size tool is useless as well in that it won’t accept values that are relative to the actual image — the values that it accepts are relative to the resampled image. Good luck plugging in a basic 1200×1600 crop size.
It crops your images, which is good. It adds very visible pixelization when resampling, which is bad. And it distorts the aspect ratio of the cropped image, which is horrible. without a major overhaul, both versions of Cropster will damage your photos and should be avoided.
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 3.0 or later
=M=
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