Bert Archer Special to the Star
Unless you’re a pro (or just like spending a lot of money), phones are the new cameras. And instead of collecting lenses, phone photographers can collect apps. You might have heard of Instagram, the little-app-that-could, and did, take camera phones from gadget to must-have. But it’s just one of dozens of good apps designed to let you get even more out of your phone when you take it with you on March break.
Taking pictures
Camera+ ($1.99, iOS) gives your phone camera such big-boy camera functions as burst (take a bunch of pictures in quick succession), image stabilizer, an on-screen grid to help compose your shots and even set your exposure. HDR Camera and HDR Camera+ (free/$3.97; Android) let you make pictures that take the best lighting conditions from three quick shots rolled into one (known as high dynamic range shots. It really makes a difference. Pro HDR Camera ($1.97; Android, iOS) is a cheaper, multiplatform option.
Slow Shutter Cam ($0.99; iOS) lets you take long exposure shots, the sort that let you blur the passing crowds in front of the unmoving Pantheon, for instance. Camera Genie ($1.90; Android) does something similar, but only for the Samsung Galaxy S2.
Night Vision Camera (free; Android) maximizes the light sensitivity of your phone, letting you take pictures in very low light conditions. There are other apps with similar names, for Android and other platforms, that can let you make your regularly shot pics look like they were taken through night vision goggles.
If you decide to invest in a tripod, you might want to look into Lapse It (free; Android) or Time Lapse Pro ($1.98; Android) to take time lapse videos. You can apply effects, trim and loop them, as well as email them, with the free version. The pro version lets you add soundtracks and share them. TimeLapse ($1.99; iOS) lets you do similar things with your iPhone.
Making them fancy
This is where the app world has decided to invest most of its collective effort. Instagram (free; iOS) is by far the most well known. In case you haven’t heard of this iOS-only app yet, it will let you apply any number of filters to your shots to make them look like Polaroids, to add tinges of colour, there are loads of them, and more are being added all the time. It also uploads the pictures you take onto the Instagram site, making it easy to share them with link-based social media. The app’s become so popular that it’s spawned a sub-industry of helper apps that allow you to map, frame your olde timey or otherwise hilariously filtered shots, and even create wall calendars with them. One of my favourites is Clockstagram (free; iOS), which lets you turn your phone screen into a clock, with the digits made up of your own pictures.
But iPhone isn’t the only game in town. There are plenty of cool apps for your Android’s increasingly high-powered cameras. Like Camera360, which lets you apply many o the same filters as Instagram, as well as do weird things like frame your picture in an easel in a pre-set photo of a guy painting in front of what may be Buckingham Palace. There’s also Paper Camera ($1.99; Android, iOS) that turns your pictures into things like pencil or charcoal sketches and cartoons. It’s also got a video option that’s reminiscent of a certain A-ha video of fond memory.
You can do wonderful, Spielbergian things with Color Splash ($0.99; iOS). It lets you render your picture in black and white while keeping certain details you choose in colour. Imagine taking a picture of your honey in the middle of the Piazza del Popolo, the buildings and crowd all black and white, and him in his bright yellow raincoat.
But it’s not all about tricks. Adobe Photoshop Express (free; Android, iOS) lets you modify brightness, colour, saturation, contrast, tint and exposure, as well as apply frames, soft focus and, of course, a whacky effect or two. It’s extraordinarily easy to use, and with a free Photoshop.com account, you can upload your edited pics to your account to work on later, or share them on Facebook or through Twitpic.
Organizing them
While both Instagram and Photoshop offer you certain organizational tools along with their primary functions, there are two apps devoted exclusively to managing your photo collections on your phone. If you just want to organize them, 3Q Photo Manager (free; Android) lets you easily put your pics into file folders so you can keep your Tel Aviv shots separate from your Eilat shots, as well as add memo notes to each. If you want to get fancier, JustPictures! (free; Android) lets you share them, crop them, make slideshows out of them and organize them into files that already exist on your phone. It will also let you see pictures in other photo accounts you may have, like Flickr or Picasa. Photo Manager Pro ($2.99; iOS) does all this, as well as letting you transfer photos between phone and computer by WiFi, or directly among iOS devices.
Sharing them
Many apps let you share shots, but some are specialists. Like Picplz (free; Android, iSO), which are hooked up to Foursquare, Tumblr, Posterous in addition to the usual suspects, and also let you save your pictures directly to the cloud using Dropbox. But the best way to share pictures on a trip is with a travel journal app like Trip Journal ($4.99; Android, iOS, Symbian, Bada) or Travel Diary (free; Android) that lets you track your trip, add pictures into geo-tagged locations, and share your thoughts and images with friends at home.
You can also make virtual postcards with a whole host of apps. They come in different styles, with different ways of sharing, nut just type “postcard†into your app store and you’ll find one you like.
Printing them
You can also send actual, paper postcards from your phone. Using Postagram (free; iOS) or Touchnote Postcards (free; Android, iOS) you can get pictures from your phone or Facebook (or Instagram with Postagram), turn them into postcards of various descriptions, choose an address from your phone book (or add one in manually), and pay $0.99 (for Postagram) or $1.49 (for Touchnote) to send it anywhere in the world. There’s a great sounding app from Canada Post (free; Android, iOS, Blackberry) that says it does the mostly same things, with the added bonus of letting you design your own stamp. They charge $2.45 plus tax, but I couldn’t get the thing to work. It kept crashing.
If you want to print pictures on your way back from your trip, you can also use ePrint (free; Android, iOS, Blackberry), Hewlett Packard’s app that lets you send your pictures to print kiosks at Pearson Airport and other places and print them out on photo paper for a couple of bucks when you get there.
No comments:
Post a Comment