Monday
Nov222010
App Update: Filterstorm
Monday, November 22, 2010 at 6:30PM | Glyn Evans 
As Apple begins pushing out iOS 4.2, so the developers begin to follow with their iOS 4.2 compatible updates, and one of the first to do so is Tai Shimizu, the developer of universal app Filterstorm.
This is a big update, so what's new in Filterstorm 2.6?
Features:
- Borders/frames tool added
- Multiple exposure tool added
- Sliders now have numerical indicator as to their value
- New Color Picker
- Completely redesigned cropping tool
- Text tool added on iPhone/iPod Touch
- Improved text tool on iPad
- Pasting photos now supports PNG & TIFF data.
Metadata Enhancements:
- Metadata, both IPTC and EXIF are ONLY SUPPORTED ON iOS 4.2
- EXIF data can now be read from the photos album and camera.
- EXIF data will be saved to all images, whether going to the photo album or being e-mailed/FTPd
- IPTC generation rewritten
- IPTC generation in XMP format only
- IPTC fields added: Country Code; Usage Terms; Contact Address, City, State, Postal Code, Email, Website
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed bug causing crashing on accepting masks on in certain situations.
- Fixed bug causing crashing on certain automations involving cropping or scaling
- Fixed bug causing crash in certain circumstances on image picker/camera on iPhone
- Fixed bug causing Filters list to sometimes be positioned incorrectly after saving large images
- Fixed bug causing padded spaces in IPTC fields
- Fixed bug causing problems activating automations at the end of long lists
- Improved support for opening photos directly from other apps.
tagged Filterstorm in App Update
Filterstorm in App Update
Reader Comments (10)
Brilliant. I have been waiting fr this. I lobe the app but it is literally riddled with bugs.
@padrag In hindsight, the iPhone release was a bit rushed and things have been a a bit flaky since then. There's a lot of fixes in this release, and the best thing you can do is email filterstorm support when something goes awry, I'm very responsive to these things.
I think this is one of the best iPhotographers toolkit app for those looking for a Photoshop type uses. Very innovative thats for sure.
Hats off to the developer!!!
Not bad, I finally decided to try it. Masking is WAY slow and fairly unresponsive on my iPhone 4. Also, multiple exposure feature is a little odd, since you can only apply the second exposure via the mask brush (which was a disappointment).
Frames are actually just a colored border, I thought it would be frames such as other apps, so another disappointment. Also the frame dialog is combined with text, so it's hard to see what the frame looks like.
The temperature tool is helpful, as are the curves and such, but a lot of this is available in other apps such as Photogene. The main selling point would be the masks, but at least for me they're too choppy to use.
Steve, The brush is slow on iPhone 4 when fully zoomed out — I'll give you that — though I don't think it's unusably so. Brushing performance does improve immensely when you're zoomed in on a section of the image.
The second exposure can be applied using all the masking tools, not just a brush but also by gradient, color range, or opacity slider. It does allow for quite a bit of creativity, though I can certainly understand you wanting overlay blending, or any of a number of other methods.
As for the border dialog, you can hide the dialog to better see the effect before applying or you can reposition the image at any time.
I don't have the digital photography background that many do, so digital editing was foreign to me. I've tried several apps for editing my photos, but never could really get into any one of them, except for a few of the automatic ones which I got tired of also. Too many are one-trick ponies. I finally bought Filterstorm a few weeks ago, and I couldn't be happier. I wish I had bought it long ago. Just getting into this update, and will definitely put it through its paces, but so far I'm liking it.
Thanks for the info, Tai, I will try it. Oddly, one of my images wound up rotated 90 degrees clockwise, although I never touched any canvas settings. But I was able to very easily fix the images tonality with gradients, and having the gradients as a tool alone makes the app worth the purchase. Thank you!
Filterstorm autorotates the image based on the camera's metadata. I would guess the iPhone didn't detect the rotation properly when you took the picture.
I have Filterstorm but don't use it much, will try to do so more. I really just wanted to post a kudos for Tai for being so repsonsive to users by watching this forum. If only all iDevelopers were this attentive.
If this thread isn't testimony enough to the fact that Tai is one of the best iOS/iphoneography/ipadography developers out there, I don't know what is :-)
Filterstorm allows me to use my iPad for what I intended -- mobile photo editing. It's THE best tool whether on the iPhone or iPad. It's certainly not without it's bugs, but Tai is fantastic about tackling them whenever they're discovered. But FS pushes the hardware and the OS to its limits with what it does and what it can do.
Now to get around to building that Automation sharing site... :-)