Transform Your Photos Into Works Of Art With A Fresh Coat Of Glaze
Glaze ($2.99) by The 11ers is not your typical run-of-the-mill photo editing app. Instead of just adding more retro filters to your photos, Glaze will turn them into fantastic looking paintings. Everyone can be an artist!
While it seemed like photo editing apps were the coolest thing a while back, most of them are now tiring because it’s already been done dozens of times. So how do you differentiate yourself from the rest? By offering something that is completely unique.
Glaze won’t be the app you turn to for fine-tuning your photograph into a perfect capture. Glaze will be the app you go to if you want to make your friends think you have some awesome talent with the paintbrush. Of course, you may or may not have actual painting skill, but this app makes your life much easier.
First thing, you’ll want to load a photo into the app on launch. There is no way to capture a new photo from Glaze, so you’ll need it ahead of time. As the original photo loads, you’ll see a scrollable palette of different watercolor effects and styles. While it’s easy to see how some will turn out from the thumbnails, some are less noticeable. Fortunately, if you tap on a style, the app will quickly render and apply it to your image.
Since there are a lot of choices for users, you will probably go through several of them before finding one that you like. Glaze keeps a history of all the styles that you have selected, which you can access in the “Workshop” mode (the tools icon). A small dot will appear on every style that you select, so you can keep track.
While in the Workshop mode, you are able to swipe left and right on the screen to navigate from the original photo through all of your selected watercolor effects. If you’re feeling lucky, at the end of the history, you can swipe right-to-left to randomly generate and apply one of the styles to the image. This is great for those who are indecisive, like me.
If you’re really creative, you can even try your hand at blending up to four different effects together into one. To do this is quite simple. In Workshop editing mode, swipe to an effect, and then drag it into one of the empty slots at the top of the screen. Once you’re happy with your selection, tap-and-hold on them to put the app into Auto Mode. Glaze will continuously generate a new style based on the blend. Each new result will only appear for a few seconds (indicated by the small timer), but will be saved in the history.
If you want to save your custom blend, just drag-up to save it to the palette while in Workshop mode. A drag-down will delete it. Once you’re done creating your work of art, you can save it to your device, post it on Facebook, or send it by email. There are three resolution sizes: low, regular, and print. In the app description, Glaze states that there is currently a cap of 2048 in both dimensions, but they are working on supporting higher resolutions in future updates.
I enjoyed using Glaze on my iPhone (it’s also for iPad) since it takes your photo and turns it into art. In the market of photo editing apps that do essentially the same thing, it’s nice to see a breath of fresh air like Glaze. It may not be the prettiest looking app there is, but it is intuitive to use and packs a lot of punch in a small package.
If you’re looking for an app to help you stand out when sharing images with others, then give Glaze a try. It’s well worth the cash.
