iColorama S for iPhone is a Powerful Yet Overlooked Photo Editor

iColorama S is a pretty versatile and robust photo effects app for iPhone. It’s FREE today only — a savings of $1.99. This is for the full iPhone version only, not the feature-limited “Lite” version. There’s an iPad version as well, iColorama, but it is not free today — it’s still $1.99.

This is a good app that you might like to have in your iPhone’s camera bag. Click past the jump for more info and an App Store link. >>>

iColorama S isn’t really a high profile app. I haven’t really heard much talk about it and I’ve had it for while. I took a closer look at it for this post. I was pleasantly surprised at the broad range of the filter set and how easy it is to work in the app.

The app has several categories of effects ranging from basic image adjustments to color and texture effects. There is little in this app that’s garish. I found most of the effects to be very usable. All effects are clearly labeled and easy to browse and apply. All effects can be applied and stacked. It has several effects that I like a lot, including a pretty cool Harris effect that can be applied to images.

It has several distortion effects, each with multiple options. You can layer and blend two images with not only the full complement of standard blending modes, but several uncommon ones as well.

The workspace is clean with many of the tools tucked away in flyaway menus. Many of the tools have a cool mask blur, a pretty unique feature. Imagine a tilt-shift blur that quickly masks the color effect rather than the image focus. It’s a pretty neat and powerful tool.

The selection of 31 textures is fairly subtle and very usable, unlike many of the dedicated texture apps.

iColorama S is fast, responsive for the most part (the Mask Blur felt a little sticky at times) and pretty stable. The app supports the full 8MP resolution of an iPhone 5. It strips out EXIF data including location info. Undo is a little clunky and I think it only works on the last operation performed until it’s locked into place by “Apply.” I don’t really have any other major issues with the app. It’s a very good, versatile effects app.

Overall, I’d say it’s worth its regular price of two bucks. It’s definitely a great free download. Grab it today while it’s free.

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (5th generation), iPad 2 Wi-Fi, iPad 2 Wi-Fi + 3G, iPad (3rd generation), iPad Wi-Fi + 4G, iPad (4th generation), iPad Wi-Fi + Cellular (4th generation), iPad mini and iPad mini Wi-Fi + Cellular. Requires iOS 5.1 or later. This app is optimized for iPhone 5.