Squara - Another Retro Square Photography App For Your iPhone
Squara ($0.99) by misskiwi is another square format photo app for your iPhone.
iPhone photography has been on the rise lately, and it doesn’t appear to be stopping any time soon, especially with the awesome camera of the 4S. Another growing trend in iPhone photography is the square format for photos, made extremely popular by apps such as Hipstamatic and Instagram. While it may not work for everything, the square format does add a certain bit of charm to images, so it’s understandable why it continues to grow. And with that, we have a new contender in the square photo space – Squara.
When Squara launches, you’ll get a camera interface that is reminiscent of the toy cameras of yore. The viewfinder is a square shape already, so what you see is essentially what you get. The standard camera controls are found at the top, which include: front-facing camera toggle, white balance lock, silent mode (reduces quality of images, not recommended), and flash. Right underneath the square viewfinder is a slider for zoom, which is up to 6x digital. To the left of this slider is a button to import photos from your photo library, if you want to use Square to modify pre-existing photos.
The big button at the bottom is the shutter, but there is another button to the left of it. This will bring up the six different lens options of the app: Single, 2x2 Multi, 3 Sampler, 3x3 Multi, x2 Exposure, and Pinhole. Just swipe between the lenses to choose a different one – there is an image associated with each one that will give you an idea of how the final image should look.
Once a photo is snapped or imported, you’re then taken to the editing section of the app. From here, there are several options: Effects, Adjust, Borders, and LightLeaks.
With the Effects tab, you can apply one of 19 different filters. However, there is no way to adjust the strength of the applied filter – this would be something I would like to see in the future.
The Adjustment tab has five different effects that will enhance the appearance of the image. In Borders, there are 12 borders to choose from, each adding a unique “vintage” look to the photo. If you’re a fan of light leaks, you’ll be happy to know hat there are 10 various kinds to choose from in the LightLeaks section.
Other options on the right side of image (no matter which tab you’re in) include the ability to rotate and flip the image, and even apply a tilt-shift effect. If you’re truly indecisive, a random option is there for kicks.
If you find a combination that you particularly like, you can save it as a user preset with the button in the top left corner. Saved presets can be applied to photos at any time from this button as well.
When you’re done editing a photo, you can save it to your Camera Roll (the option for high resolution is there), or share it with others! The sharing option provides Twitter (via native support in iOS 5), email, sending to Instagram, or opening to another app.
To access Squara’s settings, you’ll need to be back at the main camera interface (just tap on the “x” in the top right corner to exit editing mode). The gear icon in the bottom right will bring up the settings. In Settings, you will have options to toggle grid lines, high quality prints, shake to randomize (rather than tapping the button), auto-save the original image, and even chose one of three camera faces (Classic Black, Classic Silver, or Black & White).
I found Squara a pleasure to use, though I did encounter a few problems.
The biggest drawback is that the app seems to take a while to render live previews of the various filters. I got a lot of spinners when trying to change effects, and even when going back to a previous effect, the app would have to render it again. I hope that the developers can improve the speed of effect previews in the future to make it up-to-speed with other camera apps out there, such as Instagram.
The other problem was that the app did crash on me a few times. It seemed to happen more so with the multi-image lenses, such as the 3x3 multi. The app also did not save my state when I exited the app during an edit and came back to it later, thus causing me to restart my editing (it was an imported photo).
I like Squara, and feel that it has a lot of promise in the square photography market. However, before it can be fully useable, it needs speed and performance improvements, as well as the ability to adjust effect strength. Adding more social network sharing wouldn’t hurt, either. Once that happens, this could be one of the best little photo apps around.
