Creative Photography for iPhone Users

Moody, dreamy — I like how Plastic Bullet sees the world!

Ever since first get­ting an iPhone a cou­ple of years ago, I have had a rocky rela­tion­ship with the built-in cam­era. The pho­tos I took were just hor­ri­ble: blurry, unin­spired messes that irri­tated me. For the most part, I ignored it, despite a few exper­i­ments with pho­tog­ra­phy apps and the com­pul­sive kitty pic­tures. My feel­ing was that I’d rather lug around my Nikon dSLR — fairly out­dated at five years old — than try to do any­thing mean­ing­ful with my iPhone camera.

But recently, I’ve been want­ing to change my atti­tude. I now have an iPhone 4, which has a bet­ter cam­era and, in decent light­ing con­di­tions, it doesn’t embar­rass me as much as it used to. More impor­tantly, I’m want­ing to include more pho­tog­ra­phy in my art work, and I have to be hon­est: I’m not going to carry my Nikon every­where I go. I need some­thing small and fun. I’m also ready to let go of the snob­bery I carry from my pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher days, when toy cam­eras seemed like a way to cover up bad photo skills. Let’s be real — I’m not try­ing to doc­u­ment real­ity. I want to be creative.

Toward that end, I signed up for LK Ludwig’s iphone pho­tog­ra­phy class, The Camera in Your Pocket. Because I signed up on a hol­i­day week­end, I was aware that I wouldn’t get the class infor­ma­tion for sev­eral days. But know­ing that doesn’t stop my brain from churn­ing, so I spent a cou­ple of days on a mad ques­tion to find out every­thing I could about the lat­est and great­est iPhone pho­tog­ra­phy apps. 72 hours later, I have a lot to share!

Armed with a cou­ple of iTunes gift cards and reviews from iphoneography.com and lifeinlofi.com, I selected…well, more than a cou­ple of apps. Somewhere between ten and “an embar­rass­ingly huge num­ber.” Keep in mind that most apps sell for between .99 — $1.99 USD, so they didn’t cost me a for­tune. Also, many of these apps are spe­cial­ized, with some over­lap, and I was deter­mined to find what worked best for me. (You do not need all of these apps, by far — I can be a bit enthu­si­as­tic when I’m doing research!)

After play­ing with them for a few days, here are my favorites so far (with links to videos if I can find them):

Tilly the cat — shot in low light con­di­tions, with photo then processed by ToonPaint, ColorSplash, Plastic Bullet, Pic Grunger, and Monochromia (with curves adjust­ment via PhotoForge).

Creative pro­cess­ing apps:

• ColorSplash - selec­tive color; con­vert every­thing in your photo, except for selected por­tions, to mono­chrome. Really nice. Colorsplash video review
• Spica Super Monochrome - pro­duces high con­trast black-and-white images; has make some so-so pho­tos look much more interesting.
• Plastic Bullet — a vari­ety of toy cam­era effects pre­sented ran­domly; you can save the ones you like. I’ve used this and Spica more than any other cre­ative pro­cess­ing apps. Plastic Bullet video
• Pic Grunger - age and dis­tress your pho­tos. Somewhat lim­ited in terms of how often you’d use it, but fun nonethe­less. Pic Grunger video
• Photo fx - use this to apply a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­ent effects to your photo (many inspired by Tiffen fil­ters), as well to per­form crop­ping and other edits. I’ve had this for a cou­ple of years; a recent update makes it espe­cially great. I’ve barely tapped its poten­tial. Photo fx video

Creating pro­cess­ing apps that I might fall in love with given the right start­ing images: Picture Show, Lo-Mob, Hipstamatic, ToyCamera, ProHDR, SkipBleach.

Still unsure about: TiltShiftGenerator, Live FX, ClassicToy (free!).

Artistic trans­for­ma­tion apps:

Mmmm, makes you want a plate of French fries, doesn’t it? Or to paint…I can’t decide.

• Percolator - You kind of have to see the exam­ples on this one to get an idea for what it does. Percolator turns your photo into a series of dif­fer­ent sized color cir­cles (col­ors from the orig­i­nal photo) that appear very mod and artis­tic. Limited in use, but I love it to bits so I’d be happy to use it everywhere!
• Photo Artista-Oil - trans­forms your photo into a faux oil paint­ing. Includes a lot of dif­fer­ent styles with adjust­ment con­trols for each.
• ToonPaint - cre­ates a comic-strip style image from your pho­tos. I’ve had this one for a few months and am always impressed by the results when I use it. ToonPaint video

For cap­tur­ing bet­ter pho­tos (in place of the built-in cam­era app):

• ClearCam - if blurry pic­tures kill your hap­pi­ness as an iPhone pho­tog­ra­pher, try this app. It takes mul­ti­ple pho­tos and saves the sharpest one to your cam­era roll. I was very pleased with the results, but note that I don’t think it sup­ports the built-in cam­era zoom fea­ture. ClearCam review
• ProCamera - a rather awe­some cam­era app that appeals to my pro­fes­sional photographer’s heart. Has an on-screen level, grids that you can choose to over­lay (we called them focus screens in the olden days), nice zoom con­trols, a timer, anti-shake fea­tures, and more that I haven’t explored. I heart ProCamera. ProCamera review

Update: ProCamera also has an awe­some fea­ture that lets set white bal­ance based on one part of the image and focus based on another. This alone makes it the app of the haul!

General photo edi­tors and utilities:

• Photogene - I’ve used this a lot for fast edit­ing, specif­i­cally for crop­ping, rotat­ing, adjust­ing expo­sure and shift­ing color tem­per­a­ture. Photogene review
• PhotoForge - more full fea­tured than Photogene, this lets you adjust curves and lev­els, sharpen, and paint, though I find the con­trols to be a bit odd. PhotoForge demo video
• PhotoSize (free) — all this does is show you the dimen­sions of your pho­tos (which you can’t see oth­er­wise until you trans­fer them elsewhere)
• Photo Transfer - allows you to use your home wifi to trans­fer your iPhone pho­tos to a PC, Mac, or iPad that uses the same net­work. I find this use­ful when I’m not in my office and don’t want to do a whole sync-dealio. Photo Transfer video

I’m still exper­i­ment­ing with Film Lab, XProcess, ColorBlast (alter­na­tive to ColorSplash), Iris Photo Suite, and Monochromia. Each seems to hold promise.

You’ll note that a lot of the apps cre­ate vin­tage and plas­tic cam­era effects. I think the iPhone is ide­ally suited to this. Given the lim­its of cre­ative con­trol when cap­tur­ing an image (for exam­ple, you can’t set f-stop and shut­ter speed), being able to apply funky effects can turn an image from ho-hum to strik­ing. Take this image that I snapped on a 1^st gen­er­a­tion iPhone back in 2008:

Hmmm, this isn’t how I imag­ined it would be.

Okay, it’s inter­est­ing, it’s also washed out and grainy, and not as inter­est­ing as it was in real life. A brief fling with the Spica app turned it into some­thing I’d want to use:

Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!

Now, all these apps are not going to turn the iPhone into a high-quality cam­era — espe­cially if you have sit­u­a­tions with less than ideal light­ing. I know some peo­ple can take amaz­ing pic­tures with iPhones, but I’m not expect­ing that sort of magic. I just want moti­va­tion to take pic­tures when I’m out and about in daily life, and the tools to make them inter­est­ing enough to incor­po­rate into my art jour­nal or other work. Partly why the toy toy cam­era and artis­tic photo apps are so suc­cess­ful is because your photo doesn’t have to be fab­u­lous to start with — because, frankly, if it was that great, I prob­a­bly would have taken it with my SLR and be edit­ing it in Photoshop!

I hope these resources help get other artists going. And check out LK Ludwig’s class - I’m sure she has way more to share than I could learn in my three-day per­sonal explo­ration. (Exciting: I just spot­ted my class noti­fi­ca­tion in my email box!) Her classes are on sale for another cou­ple of days; don’t miss out.

Anyone want a run-down on some sim­i­lar cool­ness for Photoshop users, in the form of actions? Let me know. In the mean time, I’ve got some pic­tures to take.

1 per­son likes this post.

Unlike

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts