New iPhone Photo App: PhotoTropedelic
Monday, January 18, 2010 at 11:30AM | Glyn Evans 
Yeah, it's psychedelic baby!! It's iPhoneography on acid!!
Developers Description: PhotoTropedelic uses advanced image processing techniques to analyze your ordinary photographs; translate the colors, textures, and lighting; then draw upon the colors and symbols of 60's Pop Art to produce boldly unique art.
Creative Information for Artists: Several built-in options let you create spectacular images that will impress your co-workers, friends, and family.
Complexity:
- Select the amount of detail from clean simple lines to intricate layers of pattern.
Color Spectrum:
- Choose the PhotoTropedelic color palette including bright pinks, blues, yellows, and greens, or generate intensified true to life colors.
Color Variety:
- Select the number of colors you want in your final image.
Special Features: Choose from the essential embellishments to add drama and interest to your art.
- god ray bursts of alternating colors radiating out to the heavens
- stars and circles sprinkling psychedelic fairy dust
- auto-mirror the symmetry and balance of yin and yang
Technical Information:
- Bitmap and Vector images created
- Generates a jpg, png, and scalable pdf for each image. Pdf versions utilize vector curves and fills to print well at any resolution.
Heuristic Artfullness:
- We made up the term (we couldn't find any reference on Google or Bing)
Compatibility:
- Runs on iPhone and iPod Touch. Requires iPhone OS 2.2.1 or later.
AppStore Link: PhotoTropedelic - Price £1.19/$1.99
Editors comments: This is a real interesting app that can give your iPhone photos that psychedelic edge synonymous with the 1960's and Austin Powers.
As my video demo below shows the app is real easy to use and can produce some very wacky looking results, with the only real downside being that it does not save at full res (on my iPhone 3G, files sizes were an odd 1023 x 768). The only other gripe I have with this app, is it places a watermark on every photo saying "PhotoTropedelic.com", and there is no way to turn this feature off, something the dev must allow with a paid for app.
Below is the photo I produced whilst making the video...
Above: The "Magic Lighthouse" created with PhotoTropedelic using the 'Tropedelic' colour palette...but if the Tropedelic colours don't suit the photo, then why not try "Image Colors" as below, which analyzes and uses the colours found in the actual photo.
Above: The "Magic Lighthouse" created with PhotoTropedelic using the 'Image Colors' paletteDespite the low resolution and watermark gripe, this app is well worth trying and I would happily give this app 4 stars out of five, for its unique results.
Glyn Evans
There is some good news, the developer submitted an update to Apple today, so as soon as version 1.0.1 has been approved the watermark will be gone :)
As for the resolution issue, just download the PDF from with in the app to get infinite resolution.
Glyn Evans
PhotoTropedelic version 1.0.1 has just been released and removes the watermark from the final image and improves the colors for the 8 and 22 color options.
Reader Comments (17)
Ahh there goes my purchase!
NEVER ever EVER should a dev add a watermark to an image of a Paid app! Period... No excuses it's not acceptable. Then on top of that no full resolution. Hmmm I want this app but unless it's a freebie I won't pay for those two gripes alone are a frustrating peeve!
SCW
Same here! This app is obliviously just an attempt at viral marketing.
Agreed, the low resolution is a huge gripe for me. I'm hoping they fix that and get rid of the watermark in the first update. Until then, I will crop out the watermark. This one has potential though.
Bought it, love it, looking forward to the updates. A lot of fun for $1.99!
I like it a lot and think it's worth the price....surely the resolution will eventually be fixed and for now I just crop out the watermark.
Looks very interesting, this might be the 4th third party photography app I will buy.
A pity that there's a watermark, but the effects seem really fun though!
If this app gets the exposure it deserves it might be one of those apps that land in the top 100.
This app looks like it would be a blast to play with but with the watermark, I'll wait. Why watermark a paid app? Ugh.
The app is also very slow, I understand this as a developer because it needs a whole bunch of operations, but the order in which you do things could be more logical. You open an image and it gets transformed immediately with the default effects, these take up to 30-40 seconds to apply and then you probably want to change some settings and the app will have to start all over. In this process I also experienced my first crash.
So together with the watermark issue I would definitely call this a work in progress.
Thanks for the blog post! I'd like to correct 2 things: I've already posted an update to Apple to remove the watermark. And you CAN grab the image at infinite resolution as a PDF.!
Larry
@Larry Thanks for letting us know about the watermark. Also the thing about the PDF is not so straight forward. Thanks for letting us know that is a good option for now. Will make for good poster sized images. I do wish you would still allow full iPhone size resolution in jpeg form. I have a couple other suggestions. Getting to the menu to adjust the settings is a little clumsy. Also don't like how it instantly saves them. I wish you had the option to save them or not. Been fun so far though.
So after messing around with this app for a bit, I find that I really like the ability to download PDF versions of my photos. It's a bit more involved but I really only want the higher resolution so that I can print. I certainly won't be printing all the photos I edit in this app so it's quite convenient. So happy to hear that the watermark will be gone. Great job on this app, Larry!
@Larry your support email is returning invalid & your other emails are not being returned. So it's hard to want to support a developers app when they can't 1. have valid info on their own website & 2. return /reply to other emails to your personal accounts.
SCW
I just tested emails. Both support@artengines.com and support@phototropedelic.com seem to work. The first day there was a problem with the support@artengines.com address but that should be fixed now.
AT last, an app which doesn't require having the 3.1.2 OS! I don't know why others can't keep it to 3.0 and below for now.
Love it. Can't stop playing with it.....Hope there'll be more options soon too. Finally a photo app that's very different than all my others (format126, toycamera, lomob, camerabag, hipstamatic).
I am digging this App a lot Makes bad pictures really fun. I figure they will get stuff right in the update. One thing is strange is that it keeps going back to a default setting when you open it. Would be nice if it stayed at the last setting you did. I agree a save option would be good.
The PDF thing is awesome! This app is actually my fave just for that haha