App Review - CameraBag 1.4
Review updated to 1.4
I was looking forward to making this my first review as this app is my third most used app on my iPhone. The first being the camera & the second being facebook (to upload my iPhographs)
CameraBag Consist of Filters or effects that replicate different makes of cameras, thereby turning your iPhone into a virtual camera bag. The filters can be applied to both iPhographs taken with the app or more importantly pictures from your library. It’s the second option which is missing from other filter/effect apps that let them down. If your a big fan of spontaneous iPhography like me, then you don’t want to open an app & wait for it to load before taking a pic. It’s much easier to leave your camera app open, store them in the library & later edit. CameraBag gives you both options. You also have the option of viewing how it looks before saving or saving straight away & your able to choose from various preset sizes 400px 600px 800px 1200px (it doesn’t’t state what these measurements are, but I assume the longest edge)
CameraBag enables cropping & boarders that are specific to that type of camera or how they where printed during that cameras era. The crops are applied automatically, if you turn the options on. There is no manual option for crop. I’m quite happy with the autocrop as it makes for unexpected results (except cinema which is to drastic for anything that’s not horizontal), but over time you get a general idea of where you should place your image for best composition.
The apps appearance (GUI) is clean, simple easy to use & navigate. Can’t really fault it.
There is currently 9 ‘Cameras’ to choose from & obviously for legal reasons they have chosen to change the names but elude to the original cameras.
The first sample image of a hibiscus was taken with the iPhone & for reference the second image of an alley in Nakano Japan, was taken with a 9mp ‘prosumer’ camera. Here they are:
Helga - Replicating the plastic Holga camera. Desaturated colours & lots of vignetting
Lolo - Replicating the Lomo Camera. Bright vivid colours washed out whites & darker blacks
Instant - (New in 1.4) In my first review I was asking for just this & yay we got it. The classic Polaroid-like instamatic. This with a little more tweaking will become 1 of my new favourites. The washed out blacks need toning down a little, to bring back a bit of the black.
Cinema - This one is starting to grow on me. It produces some nice tones, slightly less saturated. I think it has some kind of grey scale overlay? The crop is to savage in on a vertical iPhograph. With an unsharp mask it would almost have a slight Dave Hill type look to it. The iPhographs below have black crop bars top & bottom which you can’t see on this blog.
Ansel - obviously named after the famous Ansel Adams’s brilliant B&W Photo’s. Soft Black & whites, a little flat. But nice
1962 - Very contrasty black & white with some washed out highlights & darkened lowlights. Great for that dramatic effect
1974 - Like the yellow aged photos from the seventies
Fisheye - The classic fisheye effect of a super wide angle lens, I don’t really find it that convincing & it only has occasional novelty value
Infrared - kind of a negative type effect more so than infrared. My wife likes it but I’m not sold yet (although it does look kind of cool on the second shot).
The first 3 filters are worth the asking price alone & I would use them 100 times or more a day to give my iPhographs a bit of atmosphere before I upload them to my blog or Facebook. The other main reason I like them is that I am a HUGE fan or square format pictures. I’m getting sick of seeing rectangles & ‘widescreen’ everywhere. I would ask the app makers to create a square format option for all filters. I would also like to see a 1000px by 1000px because I’m a sucker for round numbers & it’s an even megapixel.
Addition ‘Camera’s / filters’ that might be nice. Polaroid (Added in 1.4) & maybe Tilt shift (blur the top & bottom & saturate the colours to make a scale model type look) Tilt Shift should rotate depending on orientation of the iPhone
!.4 has also added the ability to turn off the ‘Cameras’ that you don’t use
The 2.2 update has created a glitch which doesn’t seem to be CameraBags fault. When you save to the library some images appear blurry, but don’t worry because when you sync them with the computer they will look fine. Hope there is a fix for this soon.
I’m happy to say that the first app to be reviewed is my favourite (so far) & I would be crazy not to give it a Highly Recommended rating
