iPhone App Review: imphoto (standard), by Marty Yawnick
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 5:23PM | Marty Yawnick 
imphoto for iPhone is an exposure enhancement app from imsense. Although the Standard version normally sells for $1.99 USD, from reading the App Store reviews, it’s often on sale (or free) and I picked it up for $0.99. The standard version has too many annoyances and disabled features to be really useful. It feels like a try-before-you-buy demo app and should be priced for free or at least allow the option of removing the annoying copyright mark.
Click above photo to see full size comparison.Like Perfectly Clear and SmartCam, imphoto is a Dynamic Range Correction (DRC) app which compensates for the limitations of the iPhone’s camera. Where many other “flash fix” apps simply crank up the brightness of an image leaving them flat and blown out, DRC apps use a number of algorithms to bring out the details in shadows without blowing out the highlights or color saturation. These apps quickly and easily improve the look of your photos.
imphoto has three, non-adjustable settings in the Standard version — Low, Optimal, and Strong. Once the filter is applied, you can easily toggle between your original image and the optimized version.
Looking past the limitations of the Standard version, how well does it work? imphoto is good, but not great. It did a decent job of correcting the gray cast and underexposure that the iPhone’s camera sometimes produces. It did a good job of restoring shadow detail — among the best in apps of this class. In some test images, the app revealed noise in some shadow areas especially using the Strong setting; in others shadow detail looked good. Highlights didn’t blow out and midtowns held up. I ran some images which were processed by other DRC apps through — images that I thought looked fine — and imphoto did little or nothing to those images. I like that it’s intelligent with its corrections.
In all of my test images, though, the enhanced contrast and optimized color seemed flat, especially compared to Perfectly Clear. Though improved over the originals, the optimized images were still a little foggy. At times, imphoto accentuated noise in the highlights that other apps didn’t bring out as much. It’s not bad, I just think it’s not great and I think there are apps that do an overall better job.
However, the limitations of the Standard version are what really make me regret this purchase. This version is feature-limited like a free demo app should be. And all of the features are unlocked by an in-app upgrade to the Pro version — an additional $4.99 purchase.
The Standard version saves at 853×640 pixels on my iPhone 2G. The Standard version doesn’t allow you to modify or fine tune any of the processing levels (The Pro upgrade supports 2G, 3G and 3GS resolutions, as well as allowing you to fine-tune exposure enhancements).
The standard version also adds an annoying copyright watermark at the bottom of the images. The only way to remove the watermark is to upgrade to the Pro version. This is common practice in free, lite demo versions of apps, but I think it’s inexcusable for an app that normally sells for $1.99. In order to justify the limited feature set and the non-removable watermark, imphoto Standard should be a free demo app. In order to justify a $1-$2 price tag, at the very least, the watermark should be removed.
For a total cost of $4.99-$6.99 (depending on which version of imphoto you purchased and how much the Standard version cost at the time of download), you can have the full-featured Pro version. That’s expensive compared to other apps in this class. imphoto does improve the contrast, luminance and color of your images. If imphoto performed significantly better than the other apps, I’d recommend the upgrade to the Pro version. At this time, I can’t recommend either version based on the combination of cost, performance, and image quality that is less than eye-popping incredible. I think there are other apps available which do a better job and cost less.
AppStore Link: imphoto (standard) - Price £1.19/$1.99
Glyn Evans
Coming soon: imphoto Pro v Perfectly Clear - the head-to-head.
Marty Yawnick
Marty,
Thank you for taking the time to review imphoto and write about it and hope that we can augment your comments with some more background.
By way of background, imsense is the developer of award-winning, patented eye-fidelity™ technology which takes a completely new approach to Dynamic Range Optimisation. As recognised experts in this field we know that one of the biggest challenges in applying DRC is that everyone has a different perception of what the ‘perfect’ image should look like.
Our focus in building our iPhone apps has been to bring this technology to a wider audience as we believe smartphones are wonderful platforms for doing great things while ‘on the go’, acknowledging the need for streamlined, one-hand touch interfaces with few, quick to make choices.
Our approach is indeed to deliver four key benefits to the user
• Reveal detail without impacting on colour balance, and ensure clarity without saturating the image
• Achieve such improvements automatically and effortlessly
• Provide a balance between quality of image and speed of delivery
• Enable an immediate, in-app, streamlined sharing of the result with the user’s social networks and photo sharing sites
We feel at this point that imphoto beats competition on both speed of processing and ease of sharing while being on par on the quality side (quality is always subjective) and keeping an edge on simplicity.
As you pointed out, our approach ensures that there is no ‘damage’ to already-processed pictures, proving the value of delivering detail without changing the shot. However you showed the ‘Perfectly Clear’ example as providing greater clarity; however, and again this is a factor of preference, we consider this to be an overly-bright image demonstrating saturation. And in fact, not revealing some of the detail that the imphoto shot reveals – look say at the tyres, or the man’s back. We also did some inhouse testing to evaluate speed of processing, and came to the conclusion that SmartCam was very far behind, not only in processing thumbnails but also in delivering the final, full size result.
Our approach in giving pre-set settings is about delivering against this simplicity promise – that one tap reveals the photo to our perception of optimal and the user doesn’t have to become a photo-editing expert, given that most of the audience for this version are more concerned with having a photo, looking its best, available for sharing with friends in the shortest, easiest fashion.
We certainly know that some prefer the slider approach and having more control, but prefer delivering an automatic and effortless interface to users. Future releases will take the quality further and closer to the levels seen in our PC/Mac products and in our third-party implementations such as onOne’s PhotoTune 3.
You correctly point out that there is more scope in terms of output in the Pro version; again this is based on what we think of as the time-detail balance – most users want a quick answer to better photos, and the standard edition is all about focusing on that simplicity and enabling the instant sharing, in-app, of those better photos.
I hope you’ll be pleased to know that we have taken note of watermark comments; a release due to be available shortly will enable all users to remove such watermark, and also includes further performance enhancements.
I hope that this will give you a little more background to us and look forward to your thoughts on future releases.
Regards, and thanks again for evaluating imphoto.
Philippe Dewost
CEO imsense ltd.
@pdewost
imphoto in iPhone App Review
Reader Comments (1)
Certainly a good review.I have an iPhone myself and this taught me a lot. I am one of the people who is also concerned with having a photo looking its best, as it was mentioned above.
Jessica Star
Designer Sale