Review: Vintage Scene - Take photos back to the Good Ol' Days
August 20, 2010
Overview
Vintage Scene by JixPix LLC is a photography app for users looking to produce vintage effects on their current iPhone photos. It lets you not only adjust colors, lighting and tones, but add wear and tear as well. This allows your photos to tell a story and take you back to the good ol’ days! I’ve always been a fan of iPhone photography, and really enjoy pushing the limits of the photos I can produce on the device. This app offers plenty of options to get your creative juices flowing. With that being said, if vintage photography is your thing, then read on to see if this app holds its own against the competition!Features:
Vintage Scene offers 16 filters which reflect photography of different time periods. Each filter can be tweaked by the Image Age, Fade Out, Image Strength, and Outline Strength. There are 63 overlays (textures) to choose from, and each one can be adjusted by strength.
If there is a combination of effects you use often, you can save the preset in the Save menu. This makes it easy to edit photos and produce your favorite effect, quickly. You can preserve your photo’s native resolution with its support for full-sized photo output. There are 3 output settings you can choose from: Low, Medium and High.
Breakdown:
The Good:
I was quite impressed with the quality of the filters in Vintage Scene. The system of editing the images was very straight forward, but the amount of scalability in each area was truly remarkable. You can easily adjust the strength of each area by sliding the bar back and forth using your finger.
What separated Vintage Scene from other photo editing apps in the App Store was its focus on the physicality of the photos. It not only adds a Sepia effect with some contrast; but it uses high resolution textures over the effect to give it the natural wear and tear, aged look. It made it seem like my photo was from the 30’s, and got dug up from a box in the basement; pretty creepy I know, but this app is for users who are seeking that effect.
The Bad:
A gripe I had with Vintage Scene was the delay between switching the different effects. For example, if I go into the texture selection screen, and back out of it, it will re-render the image; even though I didn’t choose a different texture to use. This get’s annoying especially when editing on the fly, but the delay is not “too” long per say.
It just seems like it could have been avoided by passing the image state into the memory, so that it doesn’t re-render every time you browse through the options. I’m thinking this was done to preserve performance, since Vintage Scene supports the iOS 4 multitasking service.
