Tag Archives: image enhancements

For the love of EyeEm iPhone photo share, updates and Ambassadors

Many times, services and apps are reviewed by how they do against another solution. Feature lists, support, accessibility and user interfaces of a new app have get compared to another that people think set the standard.

In the world of iPhone photo sharing, many compare others against Instagram. While I agree, the solution is very well done, there are others with a different take on the sharing problem that are equally well designed, but they are different. EyeEm is one that is a service and an app where iPhone photo sharing is at the center. Photos on the service are generally quality over quantity. People post up fewer photos, seemingly picking only their better shots. Each photo is tagged with what the photographer was doing and where they were. The location being an item they choose from a list of nearby business options or enter their own instead of being locked to a Geolocator.

A recent update to EyeEm made the application of the included filters and frames easier. While I do almost all of my tuning outside of the app, the ease of selecting an additional filter is nice. Swipe side-to-side to move through the available filters (14), seeing each one being applied, reaching the end moves you back to the start. Swiping up/down takes you through the frame options (12) to outline the photo your uploading.

You can still use the buttons along the bottom to show the filters and frames which can be manually picked. Across the top of the ‘edit’ area of EyeEm is a ‘clarify’ like enhancement tool and crop.

To get the word of EyeEm out to more possible users and to gather with people to exchange set up and usage stories, EyeEm is now offering the opportunity to be an Ambassador.

While looking at the Ambassador information, you may want to look around a bit at EyeEm’s very nice tutorial pages. Full of instructions and inspirational photos.

Growing concerns about iPhone Photo app ‘free’ bait and switch!

Some iPhone photography apps have features I really want to use with my iPhone camera and will gladly part with my hard earned dollars. Others, are light versions of professional apps that I don’t see using more than once to explore the developers way of attacking a problem. In between are the apps that I may not be convinced of  buying, but if I could play a while would most often update to a ‘pro’ version.

Some developers have found they can offer their app for a day or week at no charge. Enough fence sitters and blogs will pick it up and talk about it in more detail that when it goes back to full price the public will be better informed to purchase.

There is a group of developers that offer their app for free-for-a-day as often as once a month. This does lead to possible purchasers waiting till the app goes on ‘sale’ and then purchase. Meaning the ‘full price’ purchases start to go way down for the developer.

Enter, the game playing few developers. They offer their app for free, just long enough to get the special to hit the main stream sites, then they pull the ‘free’ pricing. That can be a matter of an hour or two. They don’t say that the sale price is for an hour or a day, so they aren’t being dishonest. But, what happens is that blogs mention the app with a review and the free price, people make the jump and then end up having to pay. Most people will continue with a 99 cent to a dollar ninety nine purchase without backing out since they are either committed or didn’t notice the price is back to full.

This quick changing price caught me out twice with the image enhancement app Large Aperture Pro. I mentioned the app a couple times before as on sale, this time thought I got a lot of emails and pulled my news item. There are many other apps doing this same quick sale removal, I am not singling out the one. It just happened to be the one that got several of my readers this morning. This means that going forward, I won’t mention any apps on sale for Free unless they specifically say for how long or I have personally seen them on sale for at least a half day.

There will be other sites still mentioning the apps playing the quick switching price game. I hope my valued readers will feel a bit better about the deals they read about here going forward (like the DMD Panorama I posted a couple hours ago, still free). Thanks!!

A grip for your iPhone 4 so it feels like a full size camera – Has shutter buttons too

Last year there was a project on Kickstarter (this post is not about a Kickstarter project) for a device that connected to a iPhone to make the photo taking experience more like a digital camera. A large grip with a shutter button and a related app that accepts the shutter button push to result in a photo being taken. I didn’t jump on board since the grip was larger for a firm group, cool, but I didn’t need anything that large.

Just released from Belkin is a similar device for the iPhone 4. It is far leaner in bulk, has two shutter buttons and wraps around the iPhone further up the body. It too has an app that must be open to do the actual photographing. If you do most of your iPhone photography through an app other than the built-in camera app, this solution may not fit your needs. If you take photos with the built-in camera, then enhance and tune from there, the Belkin LiveAction Camera Grip may add to your photography enjoyment. Rather than holding the iPhone by the outer edges, you can grip like a single purpose camera. There is something to be said about the feeling involved with taking a photo that adds to the feeling in the resulting image.

The free Belkin app that must be open to accept the physical shutter presses of the LiveAction Camera Grip allows for jumping between shooting images and recording video with a push of the shutter buttons. In fact, as your recording video, you can snap individual photos. There are comments that the sound on the iPhone has to be turned off when doing this action, otherwise the shutter sound is heard in the video.