QuickAdvice: Turn Your Photos Into Tiny Planets
Tiny Planet Photos (Free) by infoding.com We don’t often review free apps, but this one is just too much fun. Tiny Planets bends your photo around onto itself to mimic the look of, well, a tiny planet. Or, you can bend your photo the opposite way to create a tube shot. Basically, Tiny Planets does effortlessly in seconds what photographers would typically need Photoshop or a similar program in order to accomplish.
Open the app and either take a photo in-app or select a photo from your camera library. Try any photo: landscape orientation is preferable and panoramic shots are even better if you want the intended miniature planet effect. Your tiny planet will look more seamless if the right and left edges of your photos match. But really, you could use ANY shot just for giggles. You can use the app with faces, etc -- the result is something like a fisheye effect, or just a silly distortion. You can see how I tried this out with my daughter and dog in the gallery at the end of this article.
At any rate, take or choose your photo, then tap “tiny planet” to bend your photo around on itself, in a convex fashion, to create that highly detailed miniature planet look. Or, tap “tiny tube” to bend your photo around in a concave way, for the opposite effect. You can see in the composite photo at the top of this article, the Before shot is a panorama. The After shot on the left is a tiny planet. The After shot on the right is a tiny tube.
Once you have the effect you like, tap “Next” to share. From here you can Copy, Email, or Save to Photo Album. You can also share directly to Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Although you can’t post directly to Instagram, something about this app’s whimsy or perhaps its neat square photo result makes it quite popular with the Instagram community.
The only drawback with this app is the fact that it is ad-supported. However, given that it is a free app, and the ads are not overly annoying, I think it’s fair. Some iTunes reviewers complained of more obtrusive ads, covering the photos as they worked on them, but I did not find that to be the case at all. The ads stayed right where they were supposed to, neatly in the black rectangle underneath the photos.
So, if you enjoy fun/artistic photo effects apps on your iPhone or iPod touch, you definitely need to add this one to your photo apps folder!
