ScratchCam
Version 1.0
Price: $1.99, on sale for a limited time for $0.99
ScratchCam by Luna’s Edge is an easy to use app that adds cool, distressed film and photo print effects to your pics. The app features both color and black & white effects, oversaturation and color shift combinations, and several film scratch effects. It’s at its best when it’s working all three.
It creates more scraped and damaged film effects than the 70’s horror film effects that the app advertises. This is a good thing.
Using a combination of frames, film scratch and texture overlays, along with color and saturation shifts, ScratchCam does an excellent job of combining overlays and color shifts to create a seemingly infinite variation of color and monochrome, grunge and damaged film effects.
ScratchCam adds great-looking film and print stress to your photos, making them look like the negatives were dragged across a sidewalk or photo prints that were folded up and spent a few weeks in your back pocket. ScratchCam does a nice job of stressing, damaging, wearing, and scuffing up your photos.
ScratchCam is a very easy to use. There’s only one setting and that’s for photo resolution, switchable between three images giving you the option to sacrifice image quality for processing speed. Simply load or shoot a photo, hit refresh until you find something you like — ScratchCam randomly applies effects with each refresh. Then save. It works similar to Plastic Bullet except it previews only one image at a time instead of four.
I don’t mind the lack of control when creating effects. Sometimes, it’s fun just to hit refresh and see what random chance returns. It’s part of the appeal of Plastic Bullet and part of the appeal of ScratchCam.
Effects are well rendered and look like seriously hosed film. ScratchCam does it a very good job of scuffing up your photos.
ScratchCam supports full iPhone 4 resolution. Images are saved to your camera roll or you can share directly to Facebook or Flickr from within the app. Unfortunately, the app strips out most EXIF data, including all geo-tag information.
There’s a good number of damaged film overlays, but I hope they add more with each update. Although the app does a good job of mixing the combinations, providing variation, I started to notice similar overlays after several runs through the refresh button. There’s also no way to save “recipes” of your favorite combinations. Some sort of way to save presets would be a good addition in a future update.
ScratchCam is yet another dedicated app that grunges up your photos like Grungetastic and Pic Grunger — maybe even a little more gritty than either. If you have one or both of those apps, ScratchCam may not be essential, but it’s definitely worthwhile and worth a look for its unique damaged photo effects, which are different than either of those two apps.
ScratchCam is a good app to have if you like to grunge your photography and like the look of old, mangled photos. It’ll stay on my iPhone.
ScratchCam is $1.99 but is on sale for a limited time for only $0.99. Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 4.0 or later.
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