iPhone App Review: PhotoRoom by Pamela Flora

I first read about PhotoRoom, by Spire Wired Inc., here on the iPhoneography blog. When I recently received a promo code for PhotoRoom, since I am an app junkie and find photo apps in particular to be addicting, I leapt on the opportunity to put PhotoRoom on my iPhone.

The developer describes PhotoRoom as an app that will manipulate and enhance your photos using filters to tweak (or utterly change) the colors and mood of the photo. You can either use the app to take your photograph, or import pictures from your camera roll. After you've adjusted your photos to your liking, PhotoRoom gives you several options for sharing your photographs with the world and saving the enhanced pics to your camera roll.

You can't swing a cat around the iPhone App Store without hitting a camera app that slaps a filter on your photographs, and at first glance, PhotoRoom seems to be another one of those. PhotoRoom's preset filters are:

• Grayscale - black and white and the grays in-between, as you would expect
• Sepia - again, self-explanatory
• Antique - not far off from Sepia, but more yellow, like an aged newspaper clipping
• Thermal - simulates heat-detecting imagery
• Original - your original photograph
• Infrared - simulates infrared imagery
• Posterize - makes your photo a bold graphic with strong blunt strokes rather than fine details
• Solarize - similar to thermal, but tends to give everything a blue cast, with very strong punchy colors
• Oil painting - simulates a picture painted with oils

The filters themselves are not overwhelming, frankly. There are other apps that have a wider range of filters and effects, And apps that will give your photos that old-timey sepia edge or will render them in grayscale are a dime a dozen.

The filters on PhotoRoom, however, are more adjustable and tweakable than the filters on many of these other filtering apps, which means that you can, with PhotoRoom, apply a wider range of effects within the constraints of the preset filters. You're obviously not going to get a Holga simulation out of a Infrared preset, but you can use sliders to change the brightness, contrast, saturation, and hue of each filter. This means that within, for instance, the Grayscale filter, you can simulate a number of old black-and-white styles by fiddling with the adjustments. This allows a surprisingly broad array of finished products, if you're patient enough to keep moving the sliders to get the perfect effect.

Adjusting the sliders after applying the Solarize filter allowed me to purple up my daughter's pic in a way that delighted her girly-girl self:

And to make her look like a Smurf:

Being able to adjust the contrast, brightness, hue, and saturation of each of the filters really opens up what you can do with each preselected filter, which is a feature of PhotoRoom that I like a lot. Also notable: PhotoRoom allows layering of effects. However, if you change your mind about what you've done to your photograph and you want to start from scratch, you can revert back to your original photograph easily, by selecting Original in the filters mode.

PhotoRoom boasts a histogram in its adjustments mode, though it is not a live histogram that changes as you make adjustments. To see the updated histogram after making adjustments, you must exit the histogram mode and re-enter it. I do not use this feature.

Also within the adjustments screen is an option to flip your picture, which I like, and a button that permits you to reset the picture after having made adjustments, if you change your mind about all the adjustments you've made to your photograph.

The final option on the adjustments screen is to select one of several preset styles:

• Auto Adjust - similar to the auto-correct options in many desktop photo processing applications
• Early Black and White - mimics the faded, mostly blobby gray style of extremely early photography, turns out looking rather like the infrared filter on the filters screen
• Eighties Faded - creates a noisy, faded, high-contrast picture like a photograph taken in the '80s
• Fake HDR - boosts the color saturation of the photo, simulating HDR photography
• Edge of Color - reduces saturation to create a low-key, neutral photograph

These presets are somewhat obscure, so much so that I missed them during both my initial evaluation of PhotoRoom and again when I was playing with it for this review. I don't have test photos for these presets because, when I was preparing my photos for this review, I didn't know the presets were there. I don't know why these preset effects aren't included in the filters mode rather than in the adjustments mode. Of these preset adjustments, I like the Edge of Color adjustment best, as it reminds me a little of Helga from the Camera Bag app, but honestly, I don't envision myself using any of these presets. For my taste, their results are either undesirable for the kinds of shots I like to take, or else they're reminiscent of effects that other apps do better.

The final major feature of PhotoRoom is its export mode. I think it is this feature, along with the option to adjust the filters, that shines brightest for this app, as you can save your finished photo to your camera roll, email it, tweet it, or send it to Picasa. I put many of my pictures on Twitter, and I appreciate being able to do so from within PhotoRoom. TwitPic is the photo service of choice for PhotoRoom, and you have the option to add a remark to your tweet rather than the picture alone being uploaded. My tweet uploaded quickly and was immediately available in my Twitter timeline. I haven't emailed a photo, nor have I used the Picasa uploader, but each appears to be as well-integrated into PhotoRoom as the Twitter export is. Saving photos to your camera roll is similarly simple.

The one unfortunate thing about PhotoRoom's export mode, and it's a biggie, is that photos are not saved at full resolution to your camera roll. For emailing, twittering, and perhaps even Picasa, one would expect some compression of the photos being uploaded or sent. But if I save a picture to my camera roll, in all probability, I will want it saved at full resolution. At the very least, I would like to be able to have some say in the size of the output of my finished product. While my preteen kids probably wouldn't care that saved photos are downsized in PhotoRoom, I do care about the finished quality of my photographs and will generally want the size of my processed photos to match the size of the original.

PhotoRoom's UI is straightforward enough that it is pretty easy to navigate around and do what you want to do with your photos, with the exception of the aforementioned preset adjustments being tucked away in a hard-to-find place where they don't seem to belong. I do not care for the choice of font the developer used, and I do find that my fingers are just a little too big to comfortably use the controls which use font labels (ìtake a pictureî and ìload from libraryî). I also find the sliders in the adjustment screen to be too small; while I don't have the tiny hands of a delicate flower, I'm not a fat-fingered oaf, either, so the size of both font and sliders could stand to be upped considerably to suit users of average finger-size.

I find, too, that the adjustment sliders are far too sensitive. A tiny little nudge, as tiny as I can manage with my fingers on the pinhead-sized slider will drastically change the adjustment of my picture. This rather takes the ìfineî out of fine-tuning. It's also difficult to put the slider back in the neutral position to start fresh on a single adjustment; a small vertical mark at the center of the slider indicator line would be helpful. You could, of course, use the ìresetî option, but if you only want to reset one slider option instead of everything you've adjusted on your photo, you must try guess the neutral position of the wee slider you want to adjust, and then hope you can nudge it back there with your giant finger.

What I like about PhotoRoom:

• My favorite filter, and the one I find most useful, is the Grayscale filter. I like the fact that I can pretty quickly alter the mood of a photo I've rendered in grayscale so that it looks old and high-contrast, or more balanced and artistic. While I find the adjustment controls to be a little unwieldy, I do like the range of adjustments I can make to any of the preselected filters.
• You can very quickly and easily lay a preselected filter on a photograph without having to really do a lot of work to process your photo. You do, however, still have more adjustment options than many preset filter apps offer. This is a nice in-between for people who don't want the involvement of Photo Forge or Photogene but who would like a little more control than, say, Camera Bag offers. Also, making adjustments, the size and sensitivity of the sliders notwithstanding, is reasonably simple even for a non-pro. You will not be overwhelmed with options, but PhotoRoom does not ìtalk downî to you, either.
• I love the range of export options. I would like to see exporting to Flickr and Facebook added, but the available options for exporting my tweaked photos are both useful and easy to use.
• The UI is, in most cases, easily navigable and reasonably intuitive.
• The splash screen is refreshingly brief, and the app loads up quickly on an iPhone 3GS.
• Processing filters and effects is <i>very</i> quick once you have selected a filter or adjustment option.
• The solar and thermal filters, while they don't have a lot of usefulness for me in terms of photos I want to keep or display, are kind of trippy and fun, particularly if you lay down the filter and then make adjustments in the adjustment mode.
• Whenever you have put a filter on or made an adjustment, getting your original picture back if you change your mind about the adjustments you've made is as simple as opening filter mode and selecting original. I hate when I decide that I don't like an effect and I must revisit my camera roll to retrieve the original and start fresh. With PhotoRoom, you don't have to do that.
• PhotoRoom allows layering of effects.

What I don't like about PhotoRoom:

• The lower-than-original resolution of saved photographs is a big problem for me with any photo app, including PhotoRoom.
• I don't find the filters to be very useful for high quality keeper photos. With the exception of the very nice Grayscale filter, most of the filters are gimmicky and will not produce (what I subjectively consider to be) art. PhotoRoom can be fun to play with, but is not at this point for the serious photographer.
• The size of the font and the sliders needs to be enlarged.
• The sensitivity of the adjustment sliders is too great, and even the barest movement of the sliders yields drastic changes that can be hard to refine.
• The preset effects in the adjustment mode seem to be an afterthought. They belong, in my opinion, with the filters, and none of them is particularly useful or renders pleasing photographs. These definitely need more work, or to be removed altogether.

Overall

The cost for PhotoRoom is £0.59/$.99 at the App Store. I did not pay for PhotoRoom, but if I had, I don't think I'd be screaming for a refund. The price point is about right, in my opinion. While there are some pretty major improvements I think the developer should consider making to PhotoRoom, not the least of which is the output size of the saved and exported photographs, I do think he has laid down a pretty solid foundation for an app that could be, with some updates, an indispensable on-the-go solution for people who like altering their photographs with filters. I believe that PhotoRoom could probably fairly easily be tweaked so that it lives on the first page of your photo apps. (What, don't all of you have multiple pages of photo apps?)

PhotoRoom is not the first app I open when I'm processing my photos, but I will keep it on my phone beyond using it for the purposes of this review. The developer seems responsive and accessible (he commented on Glyn's original post introducing PhotoRoom on iphoneography.com) and that gives me some confidence that the developer will listen to user feedback and make some of the changes that could make PhotoRoom a knockout photo app.

As it is right now, I would give PhotoRoom two-and-a-half stars out of five. Whether the current version is worth paying for is arguable; PhotoRoom doesn't knock my socks off, but I have paid more money for much more disappointing apps before. I think updates to the current version would merit a boost in the star rating of PhotoRoom, and might even punch up its price point another dollar.

AppStore Link: PhotoRoom - Price £0.59/$.99

@Pamela Flora

Comments

[TX2Step]

What would be your #1 app for post production that has levels and curve flexibilities?

[Pamela]

I think I'd have to pick photoforge. I don't use it to its fullest potential (I'm lazy) but it does curves and levels, and I personally like the interface a little more than I like photogene. Photogene is good, too, mind you. And mill colour, which is free, lets you tweak levels.