iPhone App Review: HiCon Pro

If you read my review of "Light Leak", then you will know that I used HiCon Pro to increase the contrast of the sample photo before processing it in "Light Leak".

HiCon Pro is from the same developer as Light Leak, Weburban, and does nothing more than increase the contrast of your iPhone photos, but it does do it in a very quick and easy way.

HiCon Pro, the developers description

A multi-threaded application for processing images into both high contrast color and black & white. The images can be taken from the iPhone camera or from either the iPod Touch Photo Album or iPhone Photo Album. Pressing the Color+ or Gray+ will increase contrast repeatedly, allowing for very contrasty images. Images can be selectively saved directly to the Photo Album.

Photos will resemble a film-style image pushed to 1600 ISO. Color images may blow out, producing very graphic style pictures. Black and white images can be pushed to produce monochromatic flat pictures.

The App

Above: The various screen of HiCon Pro.The interface looks and works exactly the same as that of Light Leak, with the Capture, Edit and Save icons across the bottom of the screen, which when touched reveal Camera and Album, Color+ and Gray+, and finally Save across the top. Again as will Light Leak you can choose to apply a high contrast effect to your colour photos, or convert them to black and white and then apply contrast. Just like Light Leak, with each touch of Color+ or Gray+ the contrast increases, and when finished just tap saved and you're done, but again this app suffers from having no undo option, which is really annoying.

So what did I think of the App?

Just like Light Leak I found the best results were achieved by combining the results from HiCon Pro with other apps, and for the sample shot below it was the turn of CameraBag to have the HiCon Pro treatment.

Above: This photo had its contrast dramatically increased using HiCon Pro before being processed with CameraBag's Lolo effect.Overall this is app is simple to use for an albeit basic task, but due to the speed and easy of apply a high contrast effect, and the fact that I seem to be in to my high contrast images at present, this app will be remaining on my iPhone. Again this app will not win any awards, but due to its ease of use I will give it 3 out of 5 stars, so if like me you are into producing high contrast shots and want to do these quickly and easily, then check out this app.

AppStore Link: HiCon Pro - Price £0.59/$.99