A while back I wrote a review of the Darkroom! application and was critical of the developer, saying that he should have put the application through more rigorous private beta testing before releasing it to the public. The app had some serious design flaws and memory leak problems that caused it to crash so often that it was unusable in my opinion. However, at the end of that review I said that I thought that the application had huge potential, and if the developer fixed the things I highlighted in my article I would give it another chance. Last week, Steven Chaitoff sent me a note and wanted to take me up on my offer to re-review his application – now titled Dark-Room (don't ask...).

Dark-Room version 2.2 is everything that version 1.0 should have been at it's inaugural Appstore release. Steven has fixed all of the things that caused me to discourage readers from buying this application the first time around. Let's take a look at some of my original complaints and see how they were addressed in this newest version.

Throughout my first review I made a running joke about how often the application crashed. If you tried to do anything more than open an image, hit the auto correct button, and quickly save it, the application was so unstable that it would crash within minutes of normal use. After my harsh opinions were published, the developer admitted that he needed to completely rewrite the code to handle memory more efficiently. Well, he has succeeded. I've been playing with the app for about a week and have yet to make it crash – I even tried to make it crash. I pushed the limits of Dark-Room by importing an image that I took with my Canon digital SLR (8.3 megapixel / 5MB) and tried to make it crash. Keep in mind that the application is designed to edit and save images taken with the built in (2.0/3.0 megapixel) iPhone camera, and it handled the large sunset image without any problems.

Based on this improvement alone Dark-Room would have earned my endorsement, but Steven has worked to improve the interface and functionality of Dark-Room by a significant margin. From the beginning, I was impressed with the way that the edit menu fades away to reveal just the image and the slider you're currently using. My only complaint was that occasionally the sliders were hard to “grab” and sometimes “stick” when trying to use them. Now the slider interface works flawlessly and I'm re-impressed with the ingenious design.

There are several other improvements that I could describe for you, but most of them are included in the app description.

Application Description (from App Store):

Darkroom is the perfect tool for anyone who wants to do precise image editing. Don't limit your creativity to contrived effects. Instead, control the look of pictures with comprehensive adjustments that let you change brightness and contrast, color levels, hue, saturation, and more. Adjustments are applied in real time so you can see exactly how your pictures look as you modify them.

Cropping pictures is as easy as tugging on their edges. Interactively distort images with multi-touch gestures to do transformations like rotating, rescaling, squeezing and stretching.

Choose pictures from your photo albums to get started editing. Or, take a photograph directly from Darkroom (iPhone only). Saving creates a copy of existing pictures so you don't overwrite your files.

Feature List:

• Brightness
• Contrast
• Red Level
• Blue Level
• Green Level
• White Level
• Black Level
• Hue
• Saturation
• Lightness
• Grayscale
• Auto Color
• Crop
• Rotate
• Aspect Scale
• Vertical Scale
• Horizontal Scale
• Undo/Redo

What's new:

• Open and save images in landscape mode
• Crop beneath toolbar and status bar when they are showing

You guys wouldn't trust me as a reviewer if I didn't throw a few negative comments into the mix.

These aren't really criticisms of the application, but more suggestions for the developer to include in future releases. One of the things that I'd like to see added is the ability to continue editing an image if you are interrupted by a phone call or need to quit editing unexpectedly. Right now, if you accept a call in the middle of editing an image you'll have to start over after you finish your call. I'd also like to see a button to rotate the image in specific degree increments (ie 90 degrees to fix an incorrectly oriented image) in addition to using the two finger twisting method which is sometimes hard to control.

Above: before “auto correcting”Above: after using "auto correct" featureAfter using this application for the past week, I would recommend it for readers of the iPhoneography blog for basic quick editing and correcting of images that didn't quite turn out right the first time.

AppStore Link: Dark-room - Price £0.59/$.99

Note from Editor: I managed to grab this app when it was on offer for FREE, and agree with Martin's findings, so at this new low price of just £0.59/$.99 this app now comes recommended, so if you haven't already got a photo editing app for you iPhone, then this one is worth considering.

I’ve reviewed several applications for Glyn over the past month, and all have fallen short (some fell further than others) in a variety of ways. There hasn’t been one application that I could, in good conscience, recommend to the readers of the iPhoneography blog – until now.

The folks over at Gravity Loves Time (GLT) have created something that’s hard to find in the appstore; a unique application. In the sea of developers who shamelessly crank out untested code so they can be the second or third to release another farting application, GLT’s Symmetry is a breath of fresh air. Well, enough of the nerdy lovefest – lets talk about the app and show you what it can do.

Symmetry takes ordinary pictures and turns them into unique abstractions. You can take a picture from within the app or load an existing image from your photo albums then proceed to symmetricify it. When the image first loads, Symmetry will automatically divide the image along one axis – from there you can scroll or flick left/right or up/down to create the desired affect. If you want to add a few levels of abstraction just hit the Multiply Axes button and add a single or random number of symmetrical divisions.

When you’re done creating your nouveau Escher/Dali-styled masterpiece just orient the phone in either landscape or vertical to save the image in that format. What other app can transform the Roman Coliseum into a futuristic intergalactic battle cruiser? Come on, at $1.99 what are you waiting for?

Follow Martin as he travels throughout Italy on assignment using Twitter or Flickr

App: Symmetry - Price £1.19 ($1.99)

So many apps in the appstore are only there because they fill some gap in functionality that the developer believes was overlooked by Apple. Many times these “gapfiller” applications are little more than a single feature touted as a full blown app, or a replacement for an existing Apple-provided application with claims of superiority over the original. The folks at CodeGoo claim that “Camera Genius is the camera app you wished your iPhone shipped with”, according to their appstore description – we’ll be the judge of that.

I used Camera Genius on a recent trip to Colorado Springs and tried to find some uses for the app’s various picture taking features. I’m not going to give you the sales pitch and list all of the features of this app – you can read about all that in the iTunes description. I’m just going to hit the high and low points from my experience.

I typically travel by myself, and even though I’m a photographer, there are times where I don’t want to drag a tripod or tons of high-end camera gear around. That’s why I like using my iPhone camera for casual shooting and easy sharing on the web. When I’m out and about with just my iPhone there are times where I’d like to get a self portrait that’s a little better composed than the typical “arms-length toothy grin”. The timer feature in Camera Genius worked great for self portraits as long as I could find a good spot to prop up the iPhone. The timer, which can be set at various intervals between two and thirty seconds, was the feature I found most useful and just plain worked well.

The most ingenious feature award goes to… (opening envelope) sound activated shutter release! The idea behind this one is that a picture is taken when the iPhone’s microphone detects a spike in the ambient noise volume. The CodeGoo guys suggest using this feature for group shots where everyone says “cheese” to get that perfect shot when everyone is ready. I’m not sure how well this works in practice, or how useful this is in everyday situations. Personally, I felt silly yelling at the camera to take my picture because I was standing a little too far away for the microphone to hear me say “cheese.”

The single biggest thing that prevents me from recommending this application is that it takes way too long to take and save the picture. If you are going to claim that your camera is the app you “wished was shipped with the iPhone” then you need to make the basic functionality match that of the original camera app. When this app was first released it took a full forty seconds to take a picture. To give the developers some credit, they recognized this as a reoccurring negative theme in their appstore reviews and released an update that improves the speed to about 14 seconds. However, when you compare that to the native iPhone camera app, it is about ten seconds slower, which is just too much to ignore.

If I were an appstore reviewer, this app would probably get three stars for the good attempt at replacing the existing camera. I’ll keep it on my phone and only use the timer function until they can get it to save an image under five to seven seconds.

Martin is a freelance photojournalist based out of Seattle – to see some more iPhone pictures from his trip to Colorado Springs you can check out his photostream on Flickr.

Price: £1.19 ($1.99)