Five Great iPhone Apps for Photography and Design
Posted by Devon Akmon | Filed under Art & Design, Technology
Whether you’re an artist, designer, photographer or creative hobbyist, there are many excellent iPhone apps for you to use when inspiration strikes. Here are my top five recommended applications for creativity.
Color Expert
By Code Line, $9.99
This is a great tool for building color palettes when you have those moments of inspiration throughout your day. Did you see the foliage on a tree during peak Fall colors? Or was it the peeling paint on a building that got your creative ideas percolating? With Color Expert you can take a snapshot with your iPhone camera and get a color reading from the photograph. It’s easy to create a custom color palette when you’re on-the-go and inspired by what’s around you. The price tag on this app is a bit hefty, but having used the application for the past year I am confident it was a good purchase.
Features:
- Color Expert’s exclusive “snap & tap” technology. Just snap a photo and let your finger select that perfect color. From your eyes to the screen.
- Powerful, interactive color wheel with multiple color schemes including Monochromatic, Analogous, Complementary, Split Complementary and Triadic.
- Quickly search through PANTONE® solid coated, PANTONE® solid uncoated, PANTONE® Goe™ coated, PANTONE® Goe™ uncoated, Web Safe Colors, HTML Colors.
- Email your palette ideas to friends, colleagues and clients. Color Expert provides a rich, HTML based email you can send from your iPhone or iPod touch.
Brushes
By Steve Sprang, $4.99
Did you catch the cover art on the June 1, 2009 issue of the New Yorker? If so, you were looking at Jorge Colombo’s artwork, which was created using the Brushes application. This is another great app for creating artwork when you’re out and about. You can start with a photograph or you can begin creating finger sketches from scratch. Either way, this application let’s you create a digital canvas whenever you want. Be forewarned, this application is highly addictive. I should note that I liked Colombo’s cover piece so much that I purchased another print from him shortly after I saw the cover of the New Yorker!
Features include:
- Three different brushes ranging in style from smooth to bristly. Choose any brush size from 1 to 64 pixels in diameter. Erase with adjustable transparency.
- Each painting can have up to four layers. Layers can be rearranged, deleted, merged, and copied between paintings. You can also adjust their opacity.
- Select virtually any color (with transparency) using the familiar hue/saturation color wheel. Quickly choose black or white via the preset swatches. Fill the entire painting with any color (use a semi-transparent color to tint your painting).
Photoshop.com Mobile
By Adobe, Free
It’s what we’ve all been waiting for! Now you can edit and tone those iPhone photos. While this is a very stripped down app for those familiar with Photoshop, there are still several important features that make PS Mobile useful. Don’t despair photographers, you need to get this app if you haven’t already done so! Your iPhone photos will look that much better.
Features:
- Edit exposure, saturation, tint or convert to black and white
- Includes sketch and soft focus filters
- Ability to crop photos
- Includes several effects, such as vibrant, pop, border, vignette blur, warm vintage, and rainbow
QuadCamera
By Art&Mobile, Free
I was a huge fan of the Nickelodeon Photo Blaster. Do you remember it? This fun toy camera would break-up a 35mm negative into four frames so that you could compose funny, segmented photographs (144 images on a 36 exposure role). It was a fun way to tell a story.
QuadCamera is a digital version of this fun camera. This app allows you to adjust both the exposure speed and the number of exposures. For $2, this application is a steal. It’s a lot easier and much cheaper than searching for a Photo Blaster (but, it shouldn’t stop you from it either!)
Features:
- Custom layouts (2×2, 4×1, 4×2, and 8×1)
- Color (vivid, bright, dull, hi-con) or black and white mode
- Adjustable timer
CameraBag
By Nevercenter Ltd. Co., $1.99
Another great $2 camera application. Similar to QuadCamera, CameraBag is a digital version on many popular toy cameras. Take a picture and choose which effect you want to use! “Cameras” include: Helga, Lolo, Instant, 1962, Cinema, Fisheye, Colorcross, Magazine, Mono, 1974, Infrared and Original. With so many choices there’s bound to be a “camera” for each image you compose.
I should mention that I have been using all of the applications in this review for a least a few months. I know there are many other great photo and design applications in the App Store. Speaking to this, I plan on exploring several of these newer applications in the near future. However, the ones listed above are tried and true, and I recommend them all without reservation. Have fun! Create something!
- Devon Akmon
Tags: Art & Design, Technology
One Response to “Five Great iPhone Apps for Photography and Design”
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iPhone Photography Exhibit | Devon Akmon Says:
December 29th, 2009 at 8:49 AM[...] my last post I shared what I think are Five Great iPhone Apps for Photography and Design. Lately, I’ve been really loving the iPhone photo applications. I’m becoming more and [...]
