New iPhone Photo App: Best Camera
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 9:15PM 
Description from the AppStore: Best Camera allows you to shoot, creatively edit, and share your iPhone images more simply than ever before.
Created by world-renowned photographer, Chase Jarvis, this app provides you with an easy-to-use set of effects that can be applied at the touch of a button. Stack them. Mix them. Remix them. Virtually infinite creative possibilities with your photos.
And what good is taking a picture if it’s not easily shared? Best Camera allows you to share your images with the touch of a button via Facebook, Twitter, email, and www.thebestcamera.com, a new photo sharing community that allows you to a contribute to a real-time gallery of iPhone photography from around the globe that is displayed right on your iPhone. That’s right, view images pouring in from all over the globe right in the palm of your hand.
It’s called Best Camera for a reason. Through the course of creating the world’s first picture book of iPhone photography appropriately titled, The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You, award winning shooter Chase Jarvis spent 6 months finding the shortcomings of almost every photo app in the market, and then he partnered with superstar developer Übermind, Inc. to bring you this app. Used by beginning amateurs and the top pros alike, this one photo app does it all.
Shoot:
- Take a picture from within the app or choose an image in your library
Filters/Effects:
- Best Camera comes equipped with a selection of one touch filters to enhance your images. For the basic user, just touch your favorite signature filter and your photos will take on an amazing new look. For more advance users, click on a few more filters, add them, stack them, and create something truly unique.
Some signature filters:
“Jewel” - One touch signature filter creates a warm, rich, textural look inspired by many images in Chase Jarvis’ current portfolio.- “Paris” - One touch signature filter creates a high contrast, high impact black and white look, much like Chase’s fine-art work from Paris and elsewhere around the globe.
- “Slate” - One touch signature filter creates a cool, textural, low saturation look inspired by architectural art images.
- “Candy” - One touch signature filter creates a high saturation, high contrast look inspired by Chase Jarvis‘ popular commercial advertising work.
Also enjoy:
- fade, contrast, lighten, darken, cool, warm, vignette, crop, and frame.
Share:
- With just the touch of a button, share your image directly with the world via Twitter, Facebook, email, or by uploading it to the new online photo sharing community www.thebestcamera.com
Community:
- Don’t forget about community! Touch the globe icon and you’ll be immersed in a real-time gallery of images from people around the world also using Best Camera.
They’re displayed in a visualizer that allows you to find out who is creating your favorite images, sort them via popular or recent, and find how those pictures were made. You can view these images online at www.thebestcamera.com
Visit www.thebestcamera.com to learn more about the app, watch a virtual tour of the app, and check out some of the world’s best iPhone photography.
AppStore Link: Best Camera - Price £1.79/$2.99
Editors comments: On first impressions, Best Camera could well be the best photo app for the iPhone, but what do you all think?
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Reader Comments (21)
if this had an advanced button that would allows slider instead of just reappyling the same effect I would only use it.
I think its great, and I think they wife will love it and I want to get more into it. Has alot of promise though.
It's going to take a couple updates if it wants to replace the photogene+tiltshiftgen+camerabag combo. But it can make some greats photos in one app.
It's well crafted and has a nice interface (although the effect presets should be more obviously labeled...although with some time I'm sure they'll end up being memorized by anyone who uses the app on a regular basis), and the output is better than some of it's competitors. Nice to see it maintains the full resolution of the camera - although a little strange that if you use the in-app email function, it generates a jpg file that's about 4x as large (in mb, not pixels) than the original file. Not sure what's going on there. The community aspect of it is well implemented, and the overall quality of the effects is good...but I don't really think it's the be-all, end-all of iPhone photo apps as some in the blogosphere seem to be suggesting today. Not to say it can't become that - I'm sure Chase has some more ideas up his sleeve. For a 1.0 app though it's quite good, a very nice addition to my app collection but at this point I don't think it will *replace* anything.
Looks like I will be spending more money once again. Thanks! lol
***** 5 Stars all the way!!!!
CJ has created a great app needs a few tweaks but great in my eyes
A waste of $3. It's basically a few filters, badly labeled, with no control over how much the effect is applied. CameraBag does the same thing, three times better, and for 1/3 of the price.
Oh, Ok, so it also uploads to a few photo-sharing sites, including the developer's own attempt at making a new photo-sharing site. Whoopee. Lots of apps do that, even for free. Lastly, the app is full of branding and advertising for the author's book. They should pay ME $3.
Not that 3 bucks is the end of the world, but I bought this app purely because of the editor's note here on Iphoneography... didn't realize that "Best Camera App' was meant as sarcasm!
yesss, I like it ....
I don't like the sound of 'no sliders'. And it hasn't got at least one feature I like from the look of the list- shadow adjust (brightness). Sometimes it's just the shadows alone I want to brighten- not the whole image.
Also, can the crop rotate?
I think I'll give it a miss. It may be good for people who haven't already got other apps and just want basic options.
I agree with all the comments above, and tomorrow I will be posting my view [not a review] on this app, and whether I think this app is more about hype, marketing and sales, than about delivering the "Best Camera" app.
After using this for a bit I'm inclined to agree with you Glyn. It is an okay app. It could have been so much better and maybe it will eventually. But at this point as nelsonh says it won't replace anything. Gee, you can post your photos on his site but there seems no way to interact with the site at all. Considering who developed this it is a bit of a dissapointment.
hi there. chase here - creator of the app. love the discussion and there's some great feedback here, i just wanted to take a second to address some of the comments so you know where my thinking was during concepting.
re: sliders. from a UI perspective we felt sliders were unnecessary only because you can achieve the same effect in this app by stacking mulitple iteration of the same filter. want more warming? at 2 warming filters. my feeling was that sliders added the number of screens the user had to visit. we wanted it all to happen in one and this was the best we could come up with in dev to achieve that. we weren't gunning for photoshop on iphone, just a quick, friendly app.
re: sharing. i wanted this to be an important part of the app. as someone who shoots images with the phone and shares them everyday, i was having to use 3 or more apps to share to those sites. as such, we put that functionality in the app. we will continue to add more sharing options.
labels. i think there should be as little text in a small light app as possible. since there's only 14 filters that we think you can get most effects out of, the hope was keeping it lean and mean. easy for the basic user one touch and go. and for the more adv user, they can stack lots of filters and reorder on the fly for lots of creative options. don't know what something does cause it doesn't have a name? touch it to see...
community: there's some pretty heavy lifting going on in the background to add and entire community 'on device'. allowing voting, etc. creating the site and a place for all that to live was a requirement of getting that on device, so we figured having it avail online made lots of sense too. at its root, all this ecosystem was really aiming to try to share the idea of taking shots with you iphone and sharing them easily. since not all iphone users have places for thier pics to live, we created thebestcamera.com to give them a home. we'll build in more sharing options over time. flickr (we tried to integrate that, but dev was going slowly.... it will be in next version however), tumblr, posterous ,etc are in our sites...
thanks again for all the feedback. the app may not be for everyone, but i want you to know that i'm really listening to all of it in hopes to constantly be improving it. it's a side project for me (as i'm a photog), but one i'm serious about.
Chase:
Thanks for chiming in, sorry I was so harsh. Now that I understand better what you were trying to do, it's a great start. Hope to see more in future updates. How about more filters, something out of the ordinary (i.e. not on PhotoFx, etc)? Go with your favorite PSP effects, some more cross-processing, maybe something like Alien Skin's Exposure (film effects). A KodaChrome Iphone Cam? :) Anyway, thanks again for listening to feedback, that alone is worth the price of admission to this Iphoneography adventure you've started. All the Best!
Tom B
i totallllllly want a kodachrome filter!
This app is fun and I am enjoying it a lot.
I am glad it does not do everything as I need limitations. If I have too many choices, I sometimes loose track of the composition itself.
I figured Flickr uploading would be included at some point in the future. I already use Tumblr and Posterous a lot because they autopost to my Twitter and Facebook. As Best Camera can already post to Twitter and Facebook, I hope these are lower priority then the Flickr posting. :-)
Thanks for the new community, Chase.
I am really starting to enjoy this app.
Thanks to everyone for their feedback/comments on this app, and a special thanks to Chase for his input, and I look forward to the future updates.
Also I'd like to say sorry about the delay in posting my view on this app, but my wife's father is seriously ill and so events have taken over this week, but i will have my post completed and ready for Monday.
The filter stacking works great, very Intuitive.
For me this app had replaced a few other and has produced some
of the best shots on my camera roll.
Great community idea, although it would benefit from more
interactivity And tweakabilty.
Impressive !
Hope your wife's father gets better Glyn.
I hope for the best for your Father in law and family.
My wishes to Glyn father in law, I hope he is better now.
Thumbs up for the app!! simple, quick, and great photos make over. I love to take photos, but am just a joe, I leave in Tokyo and the possibilities are endless for great shots. Sharing is great, simple and my pictures looks good!! in my opinion that is, but that all that counts. Cheers.
"I live in Tokyo" sorry for that.