App Review: iPhoto for iOS

By Swapnil Mathur | Updated: 5 June 2012 15:48 IST

Highlights

Apple announced iPhoto for their iOS platform, bringing the power and simplicity of the desktop software to the mobile platform.

iPhoto for iOS offers some very interesting editing capabilities, especially in comparison to Photoshop Touch. As far as image editing for tablets goes, iPhoto holds its own against Photoshop Touch and it costs half of what Photoshop Touch does. While iPhoto may lack a feature or two that Photoshop doesn't, the simplicity of using iPhoto definitely had us impressed.

With modern day tablets becoming more and more powerful, they are starting to take over many of the tasks that were conventionally performed on a desktop. With mobile devices acquiring increasingly better cameras and processors to boot, it's only natural that the digital workflow for image editing would find itself a nice home on the tabletverse.

iPhoto has long been the de-facto photo management/ editing software on the Mac. It comes preinstalled on all new Macs and does the job for majority of the crowd. On March 7th, Apple released iPhoto for iOS. It has proved to be a smash hit with the users, with over 1 million downloads in less than 10 days. We decided to download iPhoto onto our iPad 2 and see for ourselves if it lives up to the hype.

iPhoto for iOS comes hot on the heels of Photoshop Touch for iPad which we'd reviewed recently.

User Interface
Upon starting the app, we were greeted with what resembled a 'showcase' of sorts that carried all the albums in the iPad. Here, we selected the image that was up for our editing test.

Once in the edit mode, the interface was pleasingly minimalistic. All the options are neatly arranged in bars at top and bottom bar as icons. As photographers, some of the symbols at the bottom made sense, but we found clicking on the little question-mark icon (for help) to be quite helpful! The app's interface was instantly marked with neatly arranged text boxes with names of each tool and their functions. This made navigating through the tool bar a lot easier. We're guessing it would take some use before the average user would become familiar with the interface and the tools.

Tools
The image editing tools present in iPhoto go beyond the tools present in the stock photo app on iOS. While the stock app allows you to rotate, crop, reduce red-eye effect and auto enhance the image, iPhoto gives a lot more control over various other components of the image.

The first tool in the toolbar is the Crop Tool, which allowed us to not only crop our images, but also rotate them. The rotate image function was augmented by a dial at the bottom that showed us just how many degrees we were turning the image, which we found exceptionally helpful, especially when trying to re-orient the image to its original state. At the bottom right of the menu, there is a Cog icon that displays tool specific options, and in case of the Crop tool, it pops up pre-defined crop sizes. It was a little unfortunate to see the 'custom crop' option missing as we would expect that to be used quite often. While Photoshop Touch offers the same functionality, it also allowed us to select a custom crop area.

The second tool following Crop is a hybrid-Brightness-Contrast tool. The slider comprises of 5 moveable icons that adjust the levels of brightness, contrast, shadows and highlights depending on which of them you drag and in which direction. There really was no way to know which icon did what unless you move each of them one by one and see how it affects the image. Photoshop Touch's adjustment options uses simpler sliders that are rather intuitive.

Following the Brightness-Contrast tool is the Color Correction tool, with four sliders. The first slider controls the amount of saturation as a whole in the image and the next three control the amount of blue, green and yellow color in the image. Selective color correction is mostly a hit-or-miss thing with image editing tools, but iPhoto did a decent job at tweaking the colors in our image. Interestingly, Photoshop Touch does not offer any options to manipulate the three colors in any way.

The next tool is a collection of 8 brushes aimed at simplifying some very common effects people look to create in their images. From left to right, they are Repair (used to remove distractions from images, ineffective for large objects), Red eye Removal, Saturate, Desaturate, Lighten, Darken, Sharpen and Soften. Initially we wondered why there were separate brushes for Saturate-Desaturate and Darken-Lighten when they could easily be edited using the Saturation and Brightness-Contrast tools. Upon closer examination, we realized that the brushes allow us to selectively apply effects over specific areas of the images. Once we had gotten over just how mind-blowing and effective this feature was, we realized that Photoshop Touch had nothing in comparison to this. At least not in terms of the simplicity.

The final tool is the Effects tool, which is directly comparable to the Filters option in Photoshop Touch. The two, however, do not share any effects in common. When we clicked on the Effects tool, a neat little drawer opened up, with the various effects being displayed as if they were part of a color swatch. The various effects offered by Photo are Warm & Cool, Duotone, Black and White, Aura, Vintage and Artistic. While each of these effects adds a unique characteristic to the image, sadly there is no way to tweak the effect, or control how much of it is applied to the image, a functionality that comes built into the Photoshop Touch Filter engine.

Saving your Masterpiece
Before you panic, let us make it very clear that iPhoto does not alter the original image in any way, but rather works on a copy of it. Once the copy has been edited, it can be exported to camera roll, uploaded to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, iCloud, or added to a Journal.

The Journals option allowed us to create a digital scrapbook by putting together a set of images in a nice collage. But the fun doesn't stop there. We could resize our images to any quirky dimension, and even add little information widgets to the collage such as time and date, weather conditions, random text blobs etc. This journal could in turn be uploaded to the iCloud service, where it could be viewed in a larger resolution.

There is a third tab in the interface called the Events tab. It allows you to see events after they have been synced with iTunes.

Verdict
iPhoto for iOS offers some very interesting editing capabilities, especially in comparison to Photoshop Touch. As far as image editing for tablets goes, iPhoto holds its own against Photoshop Touch and it costs half of what Photoshop Touch does. While iPhoto may lack a feature or two that Photoshop has, the simplicity of using iPhoto definitely had us impressed.

In our opinion, iPhoto is best suited for those who are looking to add some one-click-flare to their images on the go, without having to deal with the complications of an in-depth image-editing suite such as Photoshop Touch. iPhoto's integration with the cloud and other services is also far better than those offered by Photoshop Touch.

iPhoto (iPhone/ iPad $4.99)

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Further reading: apple, ios, iphoto

App Review: iPhoto for iOS

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