Thursday, June 16, 2011

PictureShow

A year to 18 months ago there were only a handful of really good photography Apps, now there are hundreds.  Further, built into regular upgrades are many of the capabilities of other Apps.  It's difficult to keep up.

I have decided to spend a bit more time with some of the Apps I have only given a cursory  review.  One favorite is PictureShow.  This App would fall into the All in One category.  It has a number of preset "Filters," 45 at last count which may be combined with a collection of frames, light leaks and what it calls Noise but what other Apps would see as Grunge.  These may be combined in any order and also added to tilt shift, HDR, RGB color adjustments, and various cropping arrangements.  It also allows the creation of personal combinations--presets, which can be a very useful tool.

This App has a Random Tool...of course.  Random tools arbitrarily combine effects, frames noise etc and sometimes the results are wonderful.  PictureShow gives the option to not only see what elements are combined to make the image but also save it as a preset.  

Frames may be added to an image without degradation of the original image.  If it's 5MP going in it's 5 MP coming out.  I really appreciate that.  PictureShow also seems to recognize the frame.  If like me you might decide to add something at the last minute,  by that I mean if a Vignette is added towards the end of the workflow it doesn't darken the frame, if Noise is added after an image is framed the frame gets no noise treatment.  With other Apps I would need to backstep through my actions in order to add either.

The crop tool is very very interesting.  When changing an image to square format it up-rezes the image.  The 5MP iPhone image is 1937 pixels by 2593 pixels.  Cropping this image square makes it 1937 x 1937 or 3.7 MP and in fact this is the output size for Apps which produce a square image, like Hipstamatic.  PictureShow produces an image which is 2592 pixels square, or 6.7 MP.  I might imagine there is some degradation of the image but it's not obvious to me.

Finally it uploads quite well to Blogger, and appears to be the only App to do so.





3 comments:

  1. you know, one day I'll have to print one of these out and see how it looks at 5x7 or so

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  2. Hi Chris:
    As I understand it the iPhone 4 native resolution equates to 6x9 at 240 DPI. It does 5x7's quite well, be happy to send you a file.
    I print often and unless I'm going larger than 8.5x11 I seldom worry about it. In fact with a Mac program I helped beta test, Printopia, I will usually print wirelessly directly from my iPhone to my printer.

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  3. I love PictureShow! It's an app I keep turning back to, time after time, despite many newer iPhoneography apps. It is passing the test of time. And I didn't know about its upscaling when square-cropping -- that's very interesting!

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