App Aims: Adding An Impressionistic Touch To Your iPhone Photos

Reviewer’s Comments
Innovative idea and lots of fun onscreen, Artist’s Touch has a lot of potential. Begin by choosing a photo in the Camera Roll or take one with the iPhone’s camera. Using “Photographic Blueprint Mapping” technology (patent-pending), the app creates a blueprint from the photo, essentially turning it into a coloring book image. The app has nine media tools and six paper textures. You can control brush size and color opacity of each tool. It would be nice to see a preview of the brush size and the amount of opacity reduction is just guesswork. Representing the opacity with percentages instead of a slider bar would be much more useful. The eraser is very much like using the actual item, it will remove the all of color all the way to the blueprint whether you want it to or not.

If you’ve got a few minutes to kill and no photo that you want to paint, Artist’s Touch has a blank canvas option for those freeform pieces. Save each project to the Gallery within the app and then you can email or sync to a computer and print it out, although the export quality is terrible. The test we printed looked like a first-grader’s attempt at impressionist painting because it was so blurry.

Media tools:

• Oil Painting
• Watercolor
• Charcoal
• Chalk
• Pastel
• Pencil
• Airbrush
• Pen and Ink
• Scratch Board

Paper textures:

• Canvas
• Brick
• Cracked Paint
• Rough Paper
• Mosaic
• Stone

Still needs some work:

• Artist’s Touch crashes after being used for a semi-extended period of time, approximately 5 to 10 minutes, even after restarting device. Given what this app is doing, this is probably a memory issue which will most likely require a fresh reboot each time you want to use the it. On the upside, the image is saved even when the app crashes.
• Artist’s Touch has an undo option but it’s found under the export options instead as one of the tools.
• Brush/media responsiveness is poor—as you’re painting the color doesn’t show up immediately so it’s difficult to be sure you’re placing the color in the intended spot.
• Color palette only has 49 colors and there is no color mixer to customize your own hues.
• Edit option in the Gallery is difficult to use due to menu bar placement at top of screen so if you’re trying to delete a project, be prepared for some frustration.

Artist’s Touch is a great idea but the app still needs a lot of refining. It’s pretty amazing to watch the photo fade out to the blueprint but that’s where the magic ends. If the developers work out the stability and interface issues and provide better support, the app will definitely be an asset but until then it’s probably not worth paying for.

Check out our iPhone 3G review, music and movie download reviews as well as our other iPhone App reviews to help you get the most out of your iPhone.