iPhone App Review: Mill Colour
Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 10:00AM Mill Colour is an app similar to CameraBag but with some extra punch, and here is my review.
Launch the app and after the splash screen you are presented with the main app screen. It is from here you will either select or take a photo to edit or apply pre-defined filters to.
If you select an image as I did for this review, then as will all apps, you select one from your photo album. Once you have selected your photo and it has loaded you now have two choices to make. First off you can just select "Looks" which will load the pre-defined filters or secondly you can select "Colour Controls" which offers you a whole lot of tweaking options.
First off lets take a look at....
Looks
Looks allows you to apply a series of pre-defined filter effects to your photo, and this is done by simply stroking your finger from right to left once your photo has been loaded.
The pre-defined Looks effects are:
- Golden
- Cross-processed
- Chocolate
- Noir
- Instant
- 70's
- Milky
- Promo
- Bleached
When you're happy with the result simply tap Done followed by Save, and then Yes when prompted to save to the photo library. Now the good thing about this about this app is that if having saved a photo you want to apply a different effect to the same photo, you can select "Edit Image" and go back to "Looks" or "Colour Controls" and keep tweaking and saving to your hearts content.
So that's "Looks" out of the way, now its time for....
Colour Controls
As before load a photo to edit, but this time select "Colour Controls" and here you will be pleasantly surprised to find that you can adjust just about everything you would want to adjust, from Gamma, Gain and Saturation to something called Lift (which is brightness control). Not only can you adjust these levels, but you can also adjust the individual R G B channels for each of these levels, and this is all done by sliding your finger left to right, or right to left across the adjustment dial.
Again as with "Looks" when you're happy with the result simply tap Done followed by Save, and then Yes when prompted to save to the photo library.
One last thing
I nearly missed the option to set the output size, which can be 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960 or 1600x1200 pixels, and this is all found under Settings - Mill Colour - Size.
So what do I think of Mill Colour?
I'm not a lover of this app, as its pre-defined effects are in my opinion not as good as CameraBag's, and for me I rarely use channel adjustments in an iPhone app, but this app does come recommended, as any app with this degree of control and built in pre-defined filters all for FREE is hard to beat.
AppStore Link: Mill Colour - Price FREE
Mill Colour in iPhone App Review 
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Reader Comments (5)
In addition if you select Looks & choose a pre-defined filter, select done... You can then select Colour Controls & tweak the pre-defined filters as much as you would like. Thus enhancing or even subtley weakening an image that you might feel was too weak or too strong in a certain area within the photo.
Personally I highly recommend this app!
And at the same time I also highly recommend CameraBag too!
SCW
What a strange idea, comparing Mill Color and Camerabag. They are very different things. Camerabag's effects (and it's important to see that they are effects, as opposed to color treatments) involve vignetting, cropping, framing, and distortion. Mill is a color grading application. It's wrong to expect something else.
Hi Brandon
When I compared Mill Colour to CameraBag I was referring to the similarities in the pre-defined filter effects, and whilst I know they are not identical and Mill Colour has no vignetting, they never the less have some similarities, as does Snap Filters. Whilst Snap Filters was not mentioned in this review, the developer developed the app to be better than CameraBag, although the jury is out on this one.
That said as a FREE app Mill Colour is hard to beat, although CameraBag remains my favourite app :)
I am actually impressed with the options that this app has. To have the ability to independently control the saturation, lift, etc. after applying the grade is neat. If Camerabag was to implement this option it would be a whole different story.
Two things that could be better:
1 - Make the control wheel continue to spin when I let go
2 - Let me know what resolution the app is saving the final pic as
Not to bad though!
I found it very usefull during a trip to Budapest. Light levels were bad, bad weather. But on the fly editing of light conditions was quite good. Saving is slow though. Also missed the output settings at first...
Great app and recommend it!