FX Photo Studio by MacPhun LLC, Version 4.2 - Review

The first thing you’ll notice about FX Photo Studio is the user interface is wonderfully clear & optimised for the retina display, plenty of clean space around buttons that are logically laid out & with appropriate icons. I’ll emphasis that it really is clear & simple to use.

The cute little flower on the splash screen actually has a live view of you through your front or rear iPhone lens, although not necessary, its a cute addition. The splash screen greets you with a few clear choices: Take a photo, camera roll, import photo (from doccuments or facebook). Also the options/setting page to select your output size etc, a like heart for facebook, twitter etc to share with friends

The adjustments are basic but a nice addition for what is essentially an effects app

When using the coloursplash (selectively make some areas of the iPhograph colour & some black & white) you can’t make the selection brush very fine, but I like the addition of the loupe to see what your doing close up (even if you did call it a loop)

Some simple rotation tools are included although oddly a 5% rotation increment tool tool is in the seperate crop section. This should be a free rotation or a straighten tool & more logically placed in the rotation section. Also I think it should have the rotation icon in front of the crop icon in the main tool bar for a better workflow eg.. rotate/straighten then crop

I would also like to see the gamma adjustment replaced with levels (this could also replace the brightness/contrast and then fill that brightness/contrast slot with a sharpen / denoise tool instead)

Now as mentioned before, the main purpose of this app is the effects. I like that it uses a generic image to show you a preview of the effect so you don’t have to wait like in some other apps to generate all the previews. I would recommend a better sample image that has more colours to better show the filters. The sample image included is apart from a blue sky & small green patch of grass pretty much monotone. I used a crowded street scene I took in an lane way in Nakano Japan

Although the many effects can be sorted by category. My suggestion for serious iPhographers is that the best way to not get information overload is to use the ‘All Effects’ section grab a nice sample image you may have & spend an hour or 2 testing all the filters, then use the really really handy favourites feature to mark the ones you like, you’ll then be able in the future to just dive into your favourites folder & pull out the iPhographic you were looking for. We were going to put a list of all our favourites but decided that it would spoil your fun of exploring. But I will say that I hope the teddy bear & scary face filters die a quick but painful death

After you have tinkered with your iPhograph you can save the settings as a preset. Eg.. You may wish to make all the images you took on an occassion to have the same feel or perhaps you know that all iPhographs you take at the beach will look good with a certain effect setting 

The ability to paint in the effects to selective areas & not the whole picture is a nice touch. Also applying the effects was fast & saved quickly on our iPhone 4s (sorry we havent tested it on our 3gs yet)

I had an early version of FX Photo Studio when this app first came out & I’ll be honest, I found the effects a little bit limited & didn’t like the interface so I have been using another app for a long time & because I had this app deleted, I didn’t know it had been updated until the app makers contacted us (I couldn’t find within the app who makes it or a link, but I can tell you it’s MacPhun LLC)

It’s amazing what time (& a bit of clever hard work) can do. I have to admit now that the new interface is excellent, you don’t feel like your drowning in useless features & although many of the filters are similar to the old version, the new ones as  well as the adjustments and ways you can apply them, make them so much more useful & you can get some really great results. I would even go as far as saying that the editing is fun & not a tiresome chore that it sometimes can be with other apps

FX Photo Studio Version 4.2 gets a highly recommended award from iPhography.com & we will be putting it back into our favourite iPhography apps folder on our iPhone (& bumping the other FX app we were using)

I’m off now to do exactly what I told you guys & am going to take a good sample image & try out all of the filters with it. I maybe gone for a while but I have corn chips, avocados,  wine supplies & a comfy beenbag. Now if only I could get paid to do this…. Life would be rather sweet

This post will be updated later with some sample effects

(Source: iphography.com)