well, it’s all very well making the transition from ipod touch to iphone and opening up a whole new world of photographic fun and frolics but, let’s face it, the iphone camera is pretty basic. what it needs are some photographic apps to ‘jazz things up’ a bit. so this week, i ‘ave mostly been eating photographic apps:

camerabag - photographic filters

meet my new favourite app!

on first firing up camerabag you are presented with a dark and empty screen with a picture of a camera lens in the middle and four icons along the bottom. from L to R these icons allow you to; take a picture with the phone’s camera, email an image, save your work, or open an existing photo from your phone’s camera roll, or photos folder.

startup screen

it’s this last option that you tend to start with first. open up an image and camerabag will show you that image with one of its built-in filters applied. the filters all mimic the look and feel of classic old disposable cameras, or film stock. simply swipe left or right with your finger to cycle through the available filters. when you’re done, you click on the floppy disc icon to save the image. that’s all there is to it!

it sounds so childishly simple that you could be forgiven for thinking it was some kind of novelty app and not for ‘serious’ use but, in reality, the effects are so well chosen and configured that selecting an appropriate filter in camerabag can improve almost every photo you throw at it.

well, enough jabbering. let me run you through the various filters, using this photo of me and mazza, when we were still young and handsome:

original image

‘helga’ filter

‘colo[u]rcross’ filter

‘lolo’ filter

‘plastic’ filter

‘magazine’ filter

‘instant’ filter

‘silver’ filter

‘mono’ filter

‘1962’ filter

‘1974’ filter

‘cinema’ filter

‘infrared’ filter

[there’s also a ‘fisheye’ filter, which i’ve switched off in camerabag’s prefs, because that is a pointless novelty one!]

on the subject of preferences; camerabag’s give you a set of options for how it should treat your photo. these include toggles for borders and cropping, which control whether or not camerabag applies borders to, or crops an image to fit in with the filter in question. for example, the ‘cinema’ filter will crop the image to widescreen aspect ratio and the ‘instant’ one will crop it square and apply a polaroid style border on it. as you can see from the screengrab, i’ve turned both these options off.

another important option lets you choose what size to save your ‘camerabagged’ image out at. i’ve chosen to save at full resolution.

below those options are the aforementioned toggles, which allow you to turn individual filters on and off. i’ve turned off ‘fisheye’ and did toy with the idea of turning off ‘infrared’ as well, until i found that —in combination with ‘silver’— it actually made a really shite, boring photo i took at the weekend for my blipfoto journal almost presentable.

‘preferences

all in all, camerabag is so easy to use and delivers such good results that it almost feels like cheating, every time i use it. i could recreate all these effects fairly easily in lightroom or photoshop on my macbook, but it would take two or three passes and a bit of twiddling with various sliders each time.

my one criticism of the app is that, if the image you’re working on is very tall and narrow, or is widescreen, it tends to display very small on the filters screens, as camerabag will fit all of the image on the screen in portrait mode, with no landscape mode or fullscreen mode available. it sometimes makes working on the images a bit of a ‘squint and hope’ affair.

other than that tho’, i’m finding it difficult to think of anything bad to say about this app at all. it’s just so damnned good and such damned fun!

note: whilst this app will run on an ipod touch, as well as an iphone, you’ll have to transfer images onto the touch from elsewhere, as the ipod touch hasnae got a camera. unless you’ve got one of the new ones —in which case you’re an early-adopting bastard!

COST: £1,19 
RATING