Thanks to the combined Voltron-esque power of a bad back and some loopiness-inducing pain pills, your Uncle Scott wasn’t able to throw down a review last week. Have no fear though kids, because to make up for it, this week we’ve got a double heaping of iPhone photography apps to run through their paces. It’s because we care! Also, many photos of my cats are included. For this, I am not sorry.
Photonasis
If you’ve ever used Adobe® Photoshop®, Photonasis is, essentially, Photoshop’s Filters dropdown menu. You select a photo from your library (or take one directly from within the app), and choose one of 34 effects to apply to it.
That’s it. That’s the entire app. There are no options, no sliders to set just how much blur or distortion or whatever to apply to your picture. You pick a filter and save. As far as I could tell, the only way to apply multiple filters to an image is to save and then open the filtered photo as a new image and go from there. Most of the effects are gimmicky at best (the “Bathroom Door” filter as shown in the bottom right corner above, for example), but a couple of them could be useful for slightly touching-up an image that’s a bit too dark or sharp, or converting an image to Sepia tone or Black & White. However, if that’s what you want this app to do, you’re better off using something like Adobe’s Photoshop Mobile, which allows you a measure of control over your filters instead of a simple on/off toggle.
Polarize
Now THIS one, man oh man, I’ve had some fun with. Essentially, Polarize simply takes your photos, converts them into looking like they came from an old Polaroid camera, and then allows you to scrawl a title on them with a magic marker. Seems pretty simple, but sometimes that’s where the best ideas lie! Like Photonasis, you don’t get any control over how the image is affected, but that’s not really the point of this app anyways.
Choose your photo. Choose your text. Save. Easy. I’ve seen a number of blogs using this effect lately and wasn’t sure which program they were using to pull it off, but there you go.
Both Photonasis and Polarizer are free of charge in the App Store, so go nuts. Let your inner Ansel Adams go hog wild!
