App Review: Perfect B&W

With a name like Perfect B&W my hopes were high for this app. I was also excited to check this app out because it is OnOne Software‘s first app for the iPhone and iPad. They’re known for making some great Photoshop plugins.

The app itself has a simple user interface. There’s an option to adjust the flash setting, a button to switch to the front facing camera, access to the camera roll, the shutter release, and an S for single photo. If you tap the S, it will switch to C for continuous. This just means you won’t be prompted to make edits to a photo immediately after pressing the shutter. Just above the shutter button, there is a bump/tab. Tapping it will reveal filters/presets that you can apply to the live view. Tap the tab again to hide them.

There is also a button for more options (pictured below.) I like the ability to save a color copy. It’s nice to be able to have that as a backup in case you decide you don’t like the black and white version.

After taking your photo, you can apply a filter, or tap on the settings button for adjustment options. There are a lot of sliders you can use to adjust your image. Brightness is deeper than you’d expect. If you touch the icon to the left of the slider, you have 5 options for adjusting shadows, highlights, blues, greens, and a color I’m guessing is orange. Along with brightness, you can adjust contrast, detail (be very careful with this one!) filter, grain, soft focus (there are 3 types to choose from) toner, vignette, and border. After making your adjustments, you can save your settings as a preset by tapping the button in the top right. If you’re finished, tap the check in the top left.

Let me explain and show you why I say you need to be very careful with the detail slider. In Perfect B&W, you are making adjustments to a smaller resolution preview of your final image. Other apps employ this technique as well to provide the user with faster processing speed. This app makes fast adjustments, but they’re not accurate, in my opinion. If you slide the detail slider to the right, it looks as though it is only slightly increasing detail. Once you go to save your photo, the app makes the adjustments to a higher resolution version, which is already sharper than what you’ve been looking at. Suddenly, you’re applying detail to an image that is sharper than the preview image you were editing, and you get a crunchy mess (see below.)

The image above looks fine to me. No edit was made to it at all. Below is the b&w version that I sharpened with Perfect B&W. Again, it did not look nearly this sharp in the preview when I was working on it. Clicking on the two to see them larger helps to see the difference.

Another Concern

To be fair, this app does say it is optimized for iPhone5, so this issue may only affect older models. The live preview can have a significant lag if you shoot with a filter applied (I’m using an iphone4.) You can work around this by shooting without any filters. After you take the photo you can tap on different filters and see how they all look.

Examples of photos created with Perfect B&W

I made these after I realized I had to be careful making edits. I tried some of the presets to see if they produced better results.

      

Conclusion

I honestly found it hard to like this app after discovering the edits you make aren’t what you’ll get in the final saved copy. The filter presets seem to over process the images for my taste as well. At the time of this review, I can’t recommend this app. There are better black and white camera apps, such as Hueless. I did exchange many emails with the director of product marketing expressing my concerns with the app. She passed them on to the tech team and they’re aware of the things I experienced. I offered some ideas to help work around the preview image dilemma. I hope they continue to develop this app into something that lives up to the name. I was very pleased with their customer service. I’ve been told that full resolution saves are in store for the future. As of now, the maximum is 2048 pixels per side.

Rating: 3/5 There is room for improvement still. I trust they’ll do better with their updates.

Price: $1.99

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (5th generation) and iPad. Requires iOS 6.0 or later. This app is optimized for iPhone 5.

***Full disclosure, I did not pay for this app, I asked for a promo code so I could review it. I’m not being offered any compensation for this review. ***

http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/perfect-bw-ios/

White Dust Devil

This one is from my Nikon D7000. There were lots of these dust devils out on Soda Lake when we were there. It was surreal.

I used the new Topaz Clarity plugin on this one. I was really amazed at the clarity in the hills in the background compared to the original. I can see myself using this plugin quite a bit now. Go download the free trial here.

Pismo Sunrise & Nik Announcement

This is a sunrise I shot last week with my Nikon. It seemed uneventful and I wasn’t too excited about the location. The beach gets old when you live by it! Luckily, the colors turned out really nice and brought the photo to life.

When editing my Nikon shots in Photoshop, I like to use Nik Software’s plugins (along with other plugins.) The reason I bring this up today is it was just announced that the entire collection has dropped in price from $499 to $149. That seems like a steal and probably wouldn’t have happened had Google not bought Nik. There’s a free trial if you don’t already have the collection.

If you’re worried that these plugins might be too complicated, there are lots of training videos on their website to help you out.

Cloudporn

We had some cool clouds coming through this weekend. Both of these were shot just from the front yard.

If you follow me on facebook or flickr, you saw this beauty yesterday. Everyone sees different things in the cloud. What do you see?

Nikon D7000 shot.

iPhone4 shot. Camera+ and snapseed used.

Hueless Updated & Promo Code Giveaway

Lets get straight to the part you’re probably most interested in. The developer of Hueless was kind enough to give me 5 promo codes to give away. That means if you didn’t buy the app already, you can get it for everyone’s favorite price…FREE!

All you have to do is like David Pasillas Photography on Facebook, if you haven’t already, and leave a comment on the wall there. If you don’t have facebook, you can always just comment below. The winners will be announced by 10am pacific time on Monday.

Now lets talk about the update…

Hopefully you took the time to read my review of Hueless the other day and thought it was a pretty sweet black and white camera. Well, it was just updated with 3 more features that the users requested, including:

• Square shooting: switch back and forth between full-frame and square aspects by pinching in and out on the live viewfinder preview.
• Rest & Release shutter: Some photogs like to rest their finger on the shutter button and lift when they want to capture. Hueless, as you know, will cycle between regular and expanded shutter buttons if you keep your finger on the button. Hueless now has a preference that will disable the button modes and allow photogs to rest their finger on the shutter button and release when they want to shoot. The switch is available in the iOS Settings app Hueless pane.
• Launch Center Pro integration: We have had a lot of requests to add support for this. Not sure if you have tried it out, but it’s a neat utility app. You can get it here.

I shot some more with the square format. I actually really like this format for this camera. Now I can shoot in the more natural landscape orientation without being limited to that layout.

Snapseed is Free

I know this runs the risk of not being read since its posted so late, but Snapseed is free right now. If you don’t have it, get it.

 

 

Free App: Grungetastic

Developers like to give away apps for free around holidays. It just came to my attention that Grungetastic is also free today. Its another app from JixiPix, who make a number of apps that I’m a fan of, including PhotoArtista Oil, SimplyHDR, and Dramatic BW. Given their track record, you can expect this to be a good grunge app.

After just 5 minutes of using it, I can tell its a solid app if you’re into the grunge style. It looks better than the grunge tool in Snapseed.

Here are a few examples from the developers.

App Review: Kyoobik Photo

Kyoobik Photo is another app by JixiPix. I was first interested in checking this app out after discovering another creative app called Percolator.

Below is the user interface. Its very simple and easy to use just like their other apps. One new thing in this app is the ability to add or erase tiles. In this example, I erased the tiles on around the edge. If you wanted to, you could erase a line right down the middle, or random tiles here and there.

App Crazy

I think I have something like 45-50 photo apps on my phone right now. Thats after deleting a bunch that aren’t up to my standards. For this image, I used more apps than I ever have on a single image.

1. ProHDR
2. Snapseed
3. LensLight- Added the moon
4. FX Photo Studio- Created mirrored image
5. Tadaa- Added a couple of filters to get spacey/rainbow colors.
6. NIR Color-  Made a copy to blend in image blender at low opacity.
7. PhotoArtista Oil- Made a copy to blend in image blender for the painted reflection.
8. ImageBlender
9. FilterStorm- Separate curves adjustments for the sky and reflection

I’m pretty surprised I remembered all of that. You should click on it to see the large version.

So what do you think of the final outcome? Was it worth the trouble?

I also want to share a few blog posts that I contributed to recently. This one is on iphoneography, instagram, and being part of the in crowd. I’ve enjoyed my recent conversations with Shannon. She knows what shes talking about.

I did two posts for Mariam where I shared what I think helped me become not only a better  photographer, but a more creative individual. Here they are:  1 & 2. In the second post, I share a popular training website that offers 24 hour free trials to all of their videos. Go check it out!

App Review: LensFlare

LensFlare is an app by BrainFeverMedia that allows you to add a wide variety of lens flares and a handful of textures to your image. The selection is quite impressive for the price. The best thing about LensFlare is its very easy to use. Touch where you want the flare to go, pinch with two fingers to adjust size, and twist with two fingers to rotate.

 

You can also adjust the brightness and color of the flare. Below that is the opacity slider for the texture if you add any to your image.

If you want to add more than one flare, tap on the 2nd icon from the right to pull up the screen below. Choose Render (add flare)…obviously. While we’re on this screen, I’ll add that you can also just save the flare(s) instead of the flare(s) on top of the image. I’ll show an example I made by mistake at the end.

Thats all there is to the app, its very easy with some cool textures that you’ll see in the examples below. These are sample images that come with the app so you can practice on good photos.

The flare and texture below were suppose to be applied to the boat image, but I must have pressed the wrong save button. This is what you get when you just save the flares.

 

Here is the promo video for LensFlare.

http://www.brainfevermedia.com/apps/LensFlare.html

Conclusion

If you’re a fan of lens flares or you’re into doing some serious photo manipulation on your phone, then LensFlare is a must have. It’s really excellent at what it does and I think its a steal at this price. Having said that, I don’t think this app is for all photographers. I see it as a great tool for the more creative types.

 

Rating:   5/5

Price:  iPhone 0.99     iPad  2.99  (iPad version includes the LensLight app)

 

Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.Requires iOS 3.2 or later

***Full disclosure, I did not pay for this app, I asked for a promo code so I could review it. I’m not being offered any compensation for this review. ***

Snapseed Updated!

I had suggested to them that the center focus operated more like darken/lighten center from color efex pro and it looks like thats what we’re seeing in the new update. I’m so pleased with the way this tool works now. I rarely used center focus before, but now I think I’ll be using it a lot more often now that there are a number of great presets and you have the ability to set the point of center focus. I think its got to be the best vignette tool on the iphone now because of how natural it looks.

The other thing they updated was the black and white tool. Now you can add color filters to affect the contrast. I don’t know why this wasn’t there to begin with. I can feel comfortable deleting simply b&w now because I only kept that around in case I wanted to use a color filter.

One thing missing that I asked for was the ability to add structure in the selective adjustments. Hopefully we’ll see that in a future update.

 

App Review: NIR Color

NIR Color is another app by JixiPix. The main screen is just like their other apps, dramatic BW, PhotoArtista Oil, etc. There are presets of color combinations that they think make for interesting looks. There are also some easy to use sliders to fine tune your image. I like how jixipix keeps the same user interface for the majority of their apps. It makes it easy to pick up and use if you’ve tried their others.

 

 

     

Free App: Slow Shutter

Slow Shutter Cam is free today. I use it for my long exposures and recommend it if you’re looking for an app that can give you that silky water look. You should definitely use a tripod or set the camera on something for best results. Here are some examples of what I’ve done with this app.

App Review: PhotoArtista Oil

PhotoArtista oil is another excellent app from Jixipix. It does a great job of turning your photos into oil paintings. There are a number of presets in different categories ranging from realistic to abstract. The lower you scroll down in the presets, the more abstract the presets get. If you prefer more control, you can fine tune your painting with the sliders.

App Review: PhotoViva

PhotoViva is an app that allows you to turn your images into paintings with total control. Instead of selecting a filter to achieve a certain look, you choose brushes and paint each stroke. This allows for endless creative possibilities. Not only can you use this app to turn your photos into paintings, but you can also use it just for painting in general.