Review: Photogene for iPad
by Staff Writer
May 11, 2010
Overview
Photogene for iPad is a photo editing program redesigned for the iPad. It provides access to all your photos in you library on your iPad. Then you can crop, rotate, adjust colors, and more.
Features
The app has tons of photo editing features with eight different major sets. You can crop your photos by simply dragging with your finger, and you can rotate at 90 degree increments or straighten precisely. There are 14 pre set macros included as well as eight different filters. Also included are 13 different frames as well as 13 various text bubbles. Color adjustments include changing the exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, color temperature, levels, and RGB. You can change the curve of the overall colors as well, and all of this is done by dragging various sliders. You can save your edited photos at any resolution you want plus you can share them by e-mail or on twitter or facebook as well as copying to clipboard for use in other apps.
The Good
Photogene provides tons of photo editing features in a very easy to use package. All the photos on your iPad may not be super good looking, but you can now make them look a little better on the go with your iPad. It's super simple with everything a tap or drag away, and you can see the adjustments live right before your eyes. The UI is fine tuned to fit perfectly for the iPad with a main window for the photo which you can drag around and zoom. Then there is a small bottom panel for one of the main functionalities with the chosen option appearing in the side panel. Then as you make the adjustments on the side, the main photo is easily viewable.
The app is so easy to use that you'll want to go through your photo library to touch up a few pics. Many photos can benefit from adjusting the color balances, and cropping a little. You can always have fun to by adding some filters or macros like posterized or night vision as well as film style or 40's vintage. You can also add some frames and text bubbles then share them via email, Facebook, or Twitter. Bering able to copy to clipboard is great too, and is an easy way to add good looking photos to pages and similar apps.
Photogene works great for editing iPad screenshots which if any of you have tried to upload know that they're saved as portrait and as pngs. That means for screenshots of the iPad at landscape they will come out sideways, and saved as huge files usually over 1mb. Photogene steps in wonderfully with quick rotation of 90 degrees, and then you can save the photos at any resolution, and it saves them as jpegs which take up a lot less space compared to pngs.
If you have the camera connection accessory or plan to get it then Photogene is invaluable. You can edit photos as soon as you import them from your camera. The camera connection is good to view photos as soon as you take them, but even better when you can edit those photos.
The Bad
The only complaint you can find is that it doesn't have all the photo editing features of photoshop or a similar alternative. That's not really fair to this app as it's not setting out to be a Photoshop replacement, it set out to offer simple photo editing tools and it excels at that.
One other minor complaint is that you can't save files under a different name. It would help to change edited photo files from IMG_056 to what the picture is of. It would be nice to see a red eye removal tool also as layer functionality is expecting too much for $4.
The app provides most of the features in iPhoto on a Mac rather than what you get in Aperture. It's the basic tools in Microsoft picture manager, and for most uses with photos there is plenty here. For $4 you can't get any better interface and photo editing tools.
