AntiCrop Reverses The Photo Cropping Process
AntiCrop ($0.99) by Adva-Soft is an interesting new universal app that actually does the opposite of cropping. Of course we all know that cropping your photos comes in handy, and with iOS 5 you don’t even need an app to do it. But what if you want to do just the reverse? What if you want a little more background in your shot? Or you want to change the shape and proportion of your shots but you don’t want to lose size in cropping? AntiCrop just may be your answer.
The app is very easy to use. I would recommend first watching the tutorial, which you can view here. Next, choose a photo from your photo library or take one within the app. Then simply pull the edges you want to expand in any direction. You can also fix a slanted horizon without losing size. You can choose output resolution as original (2056x1536), medium (1600x1195) or low (1024x765). You can free hand your anticropping, or you can constrain the photo to portrait or landscape, certain shapes, or certain proportions: 3x2, 4x3, 5x4, 7x5, or 16x9.
While this technology is very cool and useful in certain situations, it’s not perfect. For example, in the sample photo I used in this article, I was able to expand to the left, right and up with no problem. The clouds look a bit unnatural, but if you don’t look too closely, it’s not bad. However, when I tried to expand the photo down, you can guess what happened. The app doesn’t “know” that feet would come next, so instead of getting kids’ feet, I got abnormally long legs! The app is just continuing the information that’s in the photo already, not creating something new. Obviously, you can’t use this app to expand any photo. You need something of a bland background, one that can just be cloned indefinitely, for the end result to look nice. As long as you’re not expecting miracles, AntiCrop is an app that can really come in handy for iPhone photographers.
