Review: Camera Fisheye+

Camera Fisheye+ is a free app that does a nice job of giving your photos a fisheye effect. I say effect, because it is just changing the geometry of the regular iPhone camera. But the results look pretty good, and unlike most of the other fisheye apps at the app store, there are no in-app purchases.

One camera effect you don’t see too often among the hundreds of camera apps is one that provides a fisheye lens effect. Of course there are some physical fisheye lenses you can hang on your iPhone (among the best is the highly recommended olloclip 4-in-1 Lens Kit – Ed.), but that seems a pretty large investment for something that is not likely to be used very often.

What it does

When you load the app there are several options before you take your photo. You can choose video instead of stills, add a software based stabilizer, use flash, or even do timer-based shots. There’s even a continuous shooting mode if you wish to use it.

The app also contains many filters that you can invoke in a live mode to see what you will get before pressing the ‘take’ button. Other shooting modes let you shoot wide and a ‘bulge mode’ that lets you adjust the distortion of the lens by swiping your fingers.

Camera Fisheye+ also allows you to load photos from your camera roll, and perform most of the same operations. The editing tools are quite strong, and include cropping, brightness, color balance, level changes using a histogram, and there is a sharpen tool, along with contrast and saturation.

In use the app is dead easy. There are buttons to push on-screen that will give you new features. Some are designed to be used before you take the picture. Others after you have taken it. The app offers undo, and the ability to revert to your original photo before you started editing. For a free app there is a lot of flexibility that photographers will like.

You can also edit photos from your camera roll, but the fisheye effect is not as good as you get from shooting live from within the app.

The bad news

No app is perfect, and the big minus of this app is intrusive ads. They pop up every so often hawking other apps, and sometimes the ads can’t be dismissed as they are on a timer, so you stare at them until they go away. Even worse, some of the ads have sound. What a great way to break the mood of an editing session.I would have much preferred to buy this app than suffer through the ads, but there is no option to do so. It’s sad to see such a well-thought out app polluted in this way. I doubt the ads could generate more revenue than setting a reasonable price for the app.

The app scales your photos down from full resolution to about 1/3 smaller. I’d prefer to see resolution left alone.

The Bottom Line

Camera Fisheye+ is not an app you are going to use all the time. But what it does, it does very well when you need the effect it is easy to achieve. There are other apps that do similar things but most are paid.

Camera Fisheye+ is a universal app. It requires iOS 6 or later, and it’s optimized for the iPhone 5, but not the newest iPhone 6 series.

It’s definitely worth getting and trying it out, if you can stay calm when the multitude of ads appear.

App Store link: Camera Fisheye+ – Sebastian Short

– Mel Martin