When I first saw the Photo to Painting app for iPhone ($0.99) I thought it was a terrific idea. Input one of your photos, and the app would render it in the style of some famous artists, like Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Monet, Van Gogh or Gauguin.
I looked at some samples, and the results looked really good. I thought the developer did a nice job of emulating those painting styles.
So what’s the problem?
I took some recent landscape shots and selected an artist to emulate. Van Gogh in my first test. It took a while (more than a minute), but I have to say, the result looked very good. So after doing the photo in portrait mode it was time to flip over and see it a a landscape aspect ratio. Oops. That doesn’t work. It’s portrait only.
That seems really strange. Since I do mainly outdoor, non-people shots, almost every thing I have except tall trees or buildings was shot in landscape mode. Photo to Painting won’t work that way. Never. Not today. Not any Day. Zip.
It’s hard to imagine making making an app with that kind of limitation. Go to any photo gallery, and if it’s not a portrait gallery, I’ll bet most of the photos are in landscape mode. Especially if they are, ahem, landscapes.
It’s clear a lot of work went into the rendering, which is well done. But no thought given to how the app would actually be used.
There are some other apps that do this very well. Waterlogue comes to mind. It has several style, and doesn’t care about your photo orientation. Mobile Monet paints in only one style, but it also works in landscape mode.
Photo to Painting lets you save your photo to your camera roll, and it can also post on social services like Instagram.
It’s a good idea for an app, but I feel like I only got half the features I should have had. Please, add landscape mode!
Download Photo to Painting
App Store link: Photo to Painting – Jose Augusto
