Review: Picoli
by Zain Shauk
August 8, 2008
Overview
A convenient and well-rounded tool for quickly editing photos from your mobile device.
Functionality
It’s no Photoshop, but Picoli does allow users to effectively touch up photos using a range of filters.
Say you recently captured a good moment on your iPhone, but the picture didn’t come out well and you want to show it off to your friends. No matter if it’s fuzzy, dark or grainy, Picoli might be able to help you salvage the viewing experience. That is, if you know what you’re doing.
Users can adjust the brightness, sharpness, contrast, color saturation and a lot more, simply by sliding a set of scales. It is easy to use, but changes made in one filter, like brightness, must be accepted and kept before moving on to the next filter.
This means that the app lacks a live preview function that allows users to edit freely and undo or keep changes at the end of their editing session. While this may seem problematic, this missing capability is not as bad as it seems.
Any edits made will not affect the original image, as Picoli will save a new copy of the photo in full 2-megapixel resolution when it is finished. This means that you could even save multiple copies of an image while editing it, allowing you to, in effect, retrace some of your steps (although not in the easiest fashion).
Review
Picoli is an efficient and powerful app that is well worth your $4.99.
After snapping a lot of pictures with my iPhone and seeing the often sub-par results, I have sometimes given up on my photos, casting them away into the abyss of my camera roll.
But Picoli has given me new camera roll confidence! And with the ability to quickly polish up new photos, I have been much more inclined to show them off, or to spend my own free time looking at them.
There are a couple of problems, such as the lack of live-preview editing, and the ability to undo edits, but for a mobile photo-editing app that goes for such a low price, you shouldn’t be expecting Photoshop-like abilities. Add the ability to track a log of your changes and the ability to zoom in on photos while editing to my wish-list of improvements for future Picoli versions.
Summary
Picoli is a great buy for anyone interested in viewing and editing photos on the iPhone. It’s effective, cheap, and to the point.
