App Update: Perfectly Clear & Perfectly Clear for iPad

"With this update, Perfectly Clear has finally found itself back on my iPhone" - editor

After a turbulent past few months, most of the bugs in Perfectly Clear and Perfectly Clear for iPad have finally been resolved and the app updates are now available.

The problems all started when developer Athentech Imaging upgraded their award winning photo correction app to support the iPhone 4 and its 5 megapixel images. Unfortunately for Athentech, their app was too powerful for the iPhone and iPad, and suffered from out of memory errors, and the newly introduced noise reduction filter was suffering from a bug, and just not working as described.

So what's new with Perfectly Clear for the iPad?

• Added support for iOS 4.2: Fast app-switching and multi-processing enabled
• Sharing made more robust: Fixed possible crash in sharing to Facebook and TweetPhoto
• Fixed crash with "oversize" images: Saving and email sharing are limited to 5 MP (iPhone 4 resolution) images; larger images will be scaled down

...and what's new with Perfectly Clear for the iPhone?

• NOISE REMOVAL FIXED for iPhone 4 images: Noise removal will now be properly applied to your corrected saved photos. Our apologies for not getting this right in our first build.
• Sharing made more robust: Fixed possible crash in sharing to Facebook and TweetPhoto
• Fixed crash with "oversize" images: Saving and email sharing are limited to 5 MP (iPhone 4 resolution) images; larger images will be scaled down
• Some cosmetic changes: New Perfectly Clear icon for Retina devices; Fixed where the "glow" appears when pressing "Fix Dark" and "My Default"; Added a note on in app purchase page that internet connection is required

With these updates comes some good and bad news. First the bad news...

Whilst this update addresses the out of memory issues that caused the iPhone to crash, memory is still a problem, however this problem can be minimized if you kill off all running apps before launching Perfectly Clear.

Also, to reduce the out of memory errors on the iPad, Athentech have had to limit the size of the photos, downscaling any image above 5 megapixel to 5 megapixels, limiting the apps appeal to DSLR users.

So that's the bad news out of the way, now for the good...

The good news is that Athentech have finally got the noise reduction filter cracked, as my extreme example below shows.

Above: The original under exposed shotAbove is the original photo corrected by Perfectly Clear, whilst below is the zoomed in section of this photo with and without the noise reduction filter.

This is a crucial update for Athentech, and whilst Perfectly Clear still has a few bugs, these will be ironed out in the coming months.

App Store Link: Perfectly Clear; Price: £1.79/$2.99/€2.39

App Store Link: Perfectly Clear for iPad; Price: £3.49/$5.99/€4.99

Comments

[Tomba]

Hey Glyn, you announced a visit at the developers site on martys block. Is your above app update before or after your visit. Hopefully there will be another update in the short time. The new version solves only the noise reduction problem on my iphone 4 but is still worse compared to v1.3
Thanks for the report anyway.

[C White]

New technology platforms always present challenges for established software products. The adage of test, test and test again remains as true for iOS apps as for any other software. This is always helped by users willing to contribute to the process and iron-out niggling bugs. Unfortunately, the App Store doesn't present the best model for involving people in this process, and the iOS platform probably doesn't lend itself to the same willingness to help in this process, since most apps have hitherto not involved complex, integrated workflows and file processing; users expecting instant gratification. Nevertheless, as apps become more advanced, providing more complex functionality, then it will take time to perfect them; this doesn't diminish the benefits that an app can bring for a user.

I would like to have one of the promo-codes for Perfectly Clear for the iPad, since I don't yet own Perfectly Clear; and as my photography invariably finds me capturing images in less than ideal conditions, with less that perfect light, then I could benefit greatly from this app in my workflow. And as iOS and the iPad evolve into a credible workflow platform, I am experimenting with this more and more for mobile working. While it might not replace Photoshop and Lightroom on my MacBookPro in the immediate term, I think there is a bright future ahead and I'm happy to see developers of advanced processing apps bringing their products to the platform.

[Khürt Williams]

Perfectly Clear would help me improve some of my iPhone photos. I don't always have thes best light.

[Rudolf]

The image size seems to have been improved as the app states with version 1.1 that full size resolution can be selected, which with the current iPad limitations would mean 22mp max.