Author Archives: admin

Painting detail colors on iPhone Photos

An update today to ToonPaint reminded me that I should mention the features it brings to your iPhone Photos. The update included better sharing of your photo creations on Twitter and Facebook, as well the resolution was upped to match the capabilities of the iPhone4s.

The ToonPaint app can take pictures or use images from your iPhone library. Upon import, the image is converted to Black and White automatically. You can adjust the line thickness, contrast, shades of gray, etc…

Then, through the color pallet of minor options or ToonPaint’s open color picker you paint color onto images to highlight as needed. For the right picture, a bit of unique painted color is striking.

Paper photos to an online family tree using your iPhone

A family tree site is offering a free app to get your images from paper to digital. The idea is that you take a picture of the printed picture using your iPhone. The 1000memories app then lets you align the image on the iPhone so it is straight and clean. You can add text to the image as well as keywords, then upload to the online family album. So far, I have yet to see where they are charging for the iPhone app or the online service. Maybe bigger accounts of shared accounts carry an upgrade charge. I have yet to see that though.

Oink! for sharing photos and reviews

There is a new review, opinion and photo social service. This one is from the folks at Milk, their first iPhone app. After you download and get your confirmation email, you can start building your street Cred. Which is to say, posting reviews of things you know something about and other people seeing you as knowledgable.

Social services on the iPhone are difficult to do when having to show both text and photos. It will be fun to see how many folks jump in with their photos of what they enjoy and see if it matches up with my thoughts too.

Celebrate iPhoneography show this weekend with free Perfect Photo

An app that I play with from time-to-time is Perfect Photo. It has a nice group of filters and enhancement tools. Almost all of the tools have sliders to fine tune, which is much appreciated over lesser apps that just apply and go. The undo/redo is handy too so you can play a lot with images to get just the look your going for.

The app is from a company that does a lot of iPhone Photo apps so be forewarned that even if you had the for-pay Perfect Photo app, your going to get a lot of ads pushing you to the pro version of the app that is a touch more expensive (no discount for already paying for another one of their apps).

Photo apps that play games

I don’t mean the headline of this post as a good thing. I’m not saying that this is a iPhone photo app that is for playing games. I’m pointing out that you need to look over photo apps before you buy. The below screen shot is of several apps that are for editing photos taken with your iPhone, all listed as different apps by different developers. Yet, if you take the time to look at them, you will see a common feature set. They all have a image of a back of a camera body with a spot to see what your taking the picture of. Each has a different camera but the differences stop there. All with a very limited list of features leading off with many filters. They don’t know how many filters they put in their program?

Just take a minute to look at an app before buying, many are very limited and usually cost the same or more of the real powerhouse editing apps.

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Sharing photos from the iPhone to a friend’s TV

The next time your over at a friend’s house and want to share images from your iPhone, check out their TV as an option. Connecting will take a cable out of the iPhone to the TV’s input, unless they have a AppleTV2. With the AppleTV2, you can easily AirPlay from the iPhone to the TV via WiFi. You can actually share more than photos to the TV, it is also possible to share documents from your iPhone to the big screen.

This normally takes a few different apps or changing a bunch of settings as you go from friend’s house to another friend’s house… they all want to see your iPhone creations! I have started using TVOut Genie that handles all of the different kind of connections as well as different file types.

Adding text while enhancing your iPhone Photos

There is an app I use a lot for fine tuning my images, Camera+. I like the ‘Scenes’ options that allow the tune the lighting of an image. Effects is the app’s way of saying ‘Filters’ which work well. A little known feature of Camera+ is the ability to add text to images. It is hidden a bit so it’s easy to miss or even forget when you know about it.

When viewing a image to edit, choose the ‘Borders’ option, then when you choose a ‘Frame’ you will find a ‘Captions’ button. With this feature, you can add free form text, edit location and add date or time.

Moving photo editing between apps

While working on a photo in ColorSplash, I noticed that they are supporting cross app movement of the image.

A group of iPhone photo apps are using a common method of coding that gives you the ability to edit an image in one app and share it directly with another app to continue editing. You do not need to save the image from one app to the iPhone’s Photo Library then open it with another app to continue editing. From the apps’ Share option, choose to share the image with another app. You will then be presented with a list of apps on your iPhone that support the direct movement of photos between editors. I would expect the list to grow as other developers add the free feature.