Naked touch review by Trevor Murch-Lempinen

Naked touch v1.1 AU$12.99… ouch!!

There have really only been 2 apps I have really hankered after… Zen Bound… seemed to take forever to be released from when it was first announced… but was the wait worth it!!

The other was Naked touch… not because of any delay, but because I felt very penny-pinching and was so hoping the price would drop a bit at least like it had in the first few weeks that it was out before I saw it. Naked touch was one app more than any other that I was hoping that would come on special in my AppSniper “watched list” every time I launched it… but to no avail… I was out of luck and had to succumb to my desires to try this app and see if it really lived up to it’s considerable price compared to other iPhone image editors and fork out the full deal.

Naked touch was also one app more than any other that I was desperately wanting to see some review or decent comments about ever since seeing it in the App Store… I was caught by the screenshots… the absolutely clean lines of the UI said that this app had been thought about in the early design stages… even if only in the UI if not in the functionality… yeah, I am one that buys the book for the cover and the wine by the label!! In the Australian App Store there has not been one single review posted for it… either all of us Aussies are total scrooges and refused to shell out the dollars, or too lazy to post any comments for the likes of me…

The App

When first opening Naked touch you are presented with a very simple screen that is divided in half vertically with the menus items on the right hand side… this interface style follows through consistently throughout the app which is nice to see.
Starting from the top…

New Album…

This section allows one to add new albums to the Naked touch in-app based directory/photo library
Take Photo

This obviously does as it says…
Import from Gallery

This one takes you to a Photos.app directory of all the photo libraries that you have synch’ed via iTunes showing Camera Roll, PhotoLibrary and any other libraries you have on your iPhone.

Import from Roll

This one takes you direct to the current photos in the Camera Roll in the iPhone.

Settings…

This one merely takes you to where you set up Naked touch to access Facebook, Flickr and Tumbler for uploading photos.
Using Naked touch

Now this is where it takes a little bit to get used to… but nothing too difficult… just that with NO (!!) in-App OR online help/manual, one is left on their own to figure it all out… the first of several gripes with the app… but this gripe goes away pretty quickly once one uses the app, as it is more a getting used to a different way of doing things than any real hindrance. The only place anything that resembles something helpful is in the Album section, under the Options button…

Within the Album section of the App

Here one selects the photo one wants to work on…

The Main Album…

When one either takes a photo from within the app, or imports it from either the Gallery or Roll, the photo is saved/imported into the Naked touch’s own photo Album that is nominated to be the Main Album … Main is the default name given to this album but can be changed within the New Album… section (cf. above).
In any of the Albums there are 3 buttons/tabs in the top right hand corner… View, Options and Move

View

It is in the view section of an album that you begin the editing process by selecting an image from the currently active or selected Album.
When an image is selected it appears in the left hand section of the screen… and 3 buttons appear on the bottom of the image… Adjust, Crop and Send… more on these later.

Options
Under the Options tab one can rename the current Album that is active by clicking on the blue circle/arrow icon to the right of the Album name on the left hand side of the screen…
or you can Delete an entire album…
Move
In the Move section one can move photos from one Album to another, or delete/trash a photo.

Here the UI is very iPhone-like… as soon as one enters this section the thumbnails for the photos jiggle like the app icons do when you are rearranging them in the iPhone screens… a nice touch.

You click-and-drag a thumbnail from the right hand side of the screen onto the name of one of the different Albums available within Naked touch, or to the Trash… again a nice UI feature.

The real work…

As stated above, in the View section of any Album, when one selects an image to work with, 3 buttons appear on the bottom of the image…
Adjust, Crop and Send

This is where the real work and power of Naked touch resides.

When any of these buttons are selected they are all still available on the top right hand side of the screen for easy access… navigation is very nicely thought out in Naked touch… it just takes a bit to get used to initially, but is not difficult by any means.

Adjust

When the Adjust button is selected the right hand side of the screen is filled with the editing control menu items in a scrollable list…

Focus, Noise Reduction, Shadows + Highlights, Curves, Contrast + Brightness, White Balance and Color Balance
Focus
Here blurring or sharpening occurs… move the slider to the left and it blurs the image… move it to the right and it sharpens the image.

Second (and third, since it affects the next edit tool as well) gripe… this one you do not get used to without a work around… and it affects the Focus edit tool and the Noise Reduction edit tools the most… there is no way in Naked touch to be able to zoom in on the photo one is working on to see the detail of the changes one is making to it!!! Not good!!!

The work around… save the image… Move (cf. above) it from the Album it is in to the Camera Roll… quit naked touch… launch Photos app… find image… zoom in to see if it is Ok… if not… back to Naked touch to start the process again… BAD!!!!

Noise Reduction
Here one can reduce the amount of digital noise in the photo.

Third gripe… see second grip in Focus above… BAD!!!!

Shadows + Highlights
As the name suggests… Shadow and Highlight adjustment is made here… 2 sliders… top one for Shadows and the bottom for Highlights

Curves
Now the Curves item is pretty neat… one can adjust the curve by clicking-and-dragging the line, and one can even add extra points to the curve to have finer adjustments of the image… as when wishing to preserve the mid-tones and the highlight and shadow details but make fine adjustments between these… a common task in Photoshop when working on flesh tones in portraits etc. The most extra points I could add was 7… whether this was because of my stubby digits or the limit in Naked touch I do not know… as there is no manual or help!
The next 3, Contrast + Brightness, White Balance and Color Balance, all work as expected via sliders to affect changes to the image.

Contrast + Brightness
White Balance
Color Balance
Crop
Here the clean interface is very nice… no big dots/handles etc to get in the way of seeing the crop.

Simply click-and-drag on the image to the rough size and placement of the crop… in any direction… left to right, top to bottom, diagonally… what ever one prefers… and then simply click and drag on any side to limit the crop to the vertical or horizontal directions (depending on which side is selected), or from a corner to move 2 edges of the crop… just like Photoshop… but no rotate like in the Transform mode of Photoshop cropping…

Move the crop selection by click-and dragging from the centre of the crop selection.

And if one screws up the cropping there is a reset button to return the photo to the uncropped version.

Send

Here the you can send to photo to any of 3 websites… facebook, flickr or tumblr. or to the iPhone Camera roll.
If you choose one of the sites to upload to, but the phone is not connected to these sites or they are unavailable they will become dimmed and only the iPhone option will be available.
What would be good would be to have the same upload options and controls that apps like Tumblr, Facebook and Flickit offer when uploading pics to these sites, such as tagging, etc… so then I could get rid of at least 2 of them of the iPhone (so I can fit more apps on … damn that 9 screen/page limit!)

The, what I call, the “operating design” that Naked touch appears to work under is partially revealed in the screenshot below…
Naked touch is developed by the same developer, Naked, that is developing a Mac only photo editing application called Naked light that is still in beta stage, and seems to have been in that state for some time, although there is a special half price intro price available for it.

Now, it appears that Naked touch is in the same vane as Naked light in its working mode… you work on a low-ish resolution proxy version of the file and only when saving the edits are they written to the final file… this allows one to work very quickly, and view in real time, without having to wait for the dreaded beachball to stop spinning as in Photoshop. The same approach appears to be in use in naked touch… it is only at the Send do the edits made get written to file.

In the screenshots above, notice the clockwise and counter-clockwise arrows next to any of the edit menu items… the counter-clockwise arrow is the Undo, and the clockwise arrow is the Redo of any edits made under that edit menu section… VERY COOL !!! see below in the Send section of the review for more on this…

This is where the power of naked touch really comes to the fore, as it allows real-time viewing edits… albeit without the zoom function!!!... and one can return to any of the photos one is editing at anytime and undo any of the different edits to the pictures… this is REALLY COOL!!!!! no pixels are altered it appears until one Sends (read “Saves”) the image… COOL!!!

This is how several image editing applications worked in the past… the only one I can remember at the moment is Xres which was bought by Macromedia (remember those days… before Abode bought them out and killed off Aldus, and then Macromedia, FreeHand) and was included in their Studio boxed set of apps. It is a great way of working with images… especially VERY large ones… but the downside (the only one really) is that the time taken in saving the file is increased more than normal as all changes are then applied at once.

Now for the bit everyone jumped to first up… if you did, please read the rest of the review at some point to put this section into context… even if only after reading this section

Pro’s

• The workflow is very sophisticated, in that the edits are very fast and real time until Send (read “save”)
• The in-phone edits one is able to perform on photos is of a very high level very much akin to the basic edits one can do via Photoshop… albeit to a level commensurate with fat fingers like mine trying to move sliders around on a tiny screen, with no numerical input available… but this is an in-phone app so what more could one expect really.
• The UI… excellent
• No moustaches, love hearts, paw prints, kisses, bows or “POW” stamps… no frames… no wanky/butt-ugly effects that any self-respecting user would ever want to use

Con’s

• Price !!! not “BAD!!!”… but, not nice either
• Lack of any histograms… for seeing what information is captured within the digital image and how and where one can make informed judgements as to what to edit… Hopefully it will be corrected in the future...
• Lack of zoom !!! BAD!!! Hopefully this too will be corrected in the future...
• Lack of any Help/manual/tutorial… ANYWHERE… in-app… online… ANYWHERE… BAD !!
• Lack of any response from the developer… BAD !!! (have left quite a few comments asking for information on the website… in a hidden away corner of the Naked light section, of all places… Naked blog… where unfortunately none of these are displayed as they have remained for over a month and a half as “waiting for moderation” or some such thing…)

And I guess for some users…

• No moustaches, love hearts, paw prints, kisses, bows or “POW” stamps… no frames… no wanky/butt-ugly effects that any self-respecting user would ever want to use

Is it worth the price…

This was the sticking point for me… not that AU$12.99 is anything close to a bank-breaking purchase… but, it is expensive when compared to all of the other image editing apps out there for the iPhone… Photogene (AU$3.99), Photo fx (AU$3.99), Cool fx (AU$3.99) Photonasis 2.0 (AU$1.19), Picoli (AU$3.99), Photo Lab 1600 (AU$2.49), and others… this one seemed VERY excessive… and compared to the others on price point, it almost definitely is excessive… and I really wanted to know if it offered that much more than the other “similar” photo apps out there.

BUT…

This is one very, very powerful, and VERY well thought out app indeed!

It is a pleasure to use… albeit even with the 3 app gripes mentioned… the lack of zoom really does limit the usefulness of the in-app use of the Focus and Noise Reduction edits to some degree… but, once one has used these functions a few times one learns to some degree of accuracy what the appropriate settings will be… although with a bit of guesswork.

The cleanliness of the UI is such a pleasure to use… if only more app designers would have such a sense of good clean design. To this degree, I am more referring to all apps not just photo apps, as on the whole they are not too hard on the aesthetic-sensitivity-nerve, in that most are pretty clean. Photogene is a great app, but something about the UI irks me a little… haven’t quiet put my finger on it (pun intended) yet.

Would I buy it again… or recommend it…

I think, even with the cons, I would definitely buy it again… and recommend it… even at this price point… although I still can’t quite see why it has to be 3 times the price of other comparable editors… but that may be just the scrooge in me :)

If you have any experience with the behemoth that is Photoshop, you will feel at home with the controls that it offers since it is not a click-and-done type of photo app for the iPhone… you need to understand a bit… maybe a lot… of what photo editing is all about.

If you have the spare money, it is a great app to have alongside all the other filter apps etc available… but if cash-strapped… I would have to in all honesty say go with Photogene as it is so much cheaper and is almost in the same league… and does lots of things Naked touch doesn’t

Overall…

Photogene is a really great app and was the mainstay of my true editing of photos… but I will now be using it mainly for the filters/effects/frames/etc. that it offers, for these are so much better than the apps that only do these things; and the developer(s) are great, and communicate with you, and listen to you. Photogene will still be used, but mainly for those times when I want to edit an image AND, at the same time add these other bits to the photo… rather than having to use 2 or more apps.

Naked touch on the other hand will definitely stay on my photo app screen/page and it will be used as the first base for my image editing… and it will be used a lot…

And… of course, it has a really nice icon as well

AppStore Link: Naked touch - Price £5.99 (US$9.99, AUS$12.99)

Comments

[blazouf]

Thank you for this great review !!!

[blazouf]

hharrgh !
This app save only the final image at 900px !

[Tomba]

One and a half year later there is an update to version 2.0 today. It adds iPad support.
And makes you believe its ready for iPhone 4.
On iPhone it still saves at a tremendous resolution of 900x671 pixels on my 3GS.

Its a joke for 5,49 Euro. The developer should be banned!