App Aims: Fine-tuning Photos on the Fly

Reviewer’s Comments
Fancy yourself a visual special effects aficionado? Any photographer worth his or her lens cap has a bag of tricks to create outstanding visual feasts. If your camera of choice (or opportunity) is the iPhone, The Tiffen Company’s Cool fx app is your bag of tricks.

At first glance, it’s a little tough to tell the difference between Cool fx and it’s sister app, Photo fx. They are both full of various filters that improve the quality of the photos you take with the iPhone’s camera (or any photo you download to your iPhone or iPod touch.) The Application Description on the App Store even sounds basically the same. A few filters actually appear in both apps but Cool fx has a much more extensive library of filters overall and the diffusion category is exclusive to this app. There has been much said by users that one app is better than (or the same as) the other. This is not the case. As the developer has stated, they are complimentary apps. You don’t need both to achieve really great images but they each bring different functionality to the iPhone’s photo repertoire.

Cool fx’s five categories have 172 different preset filters

• Black & White(42)
• Color (35)
• Diffusion (50)
• Grain (27)
• Temperature (18)

Features of Cool fx:

• 70 different color and black-and-white film/photographic looks
• 50 different diffusion textures
• 27 grain presets that replicate the look of popular motion picture film stocks
• 18 color temperature presets
• Ability to add a vignette to any preset
• Add multiple presets without saving in between each
• Shake on the preset screen to choose a random filter
• Shake on the image editing screen to reset controls to default
• Edit in portrait or landscape mode
• Integrated help
• Crop, rotate and straighten photos

Like Photo fx, Cool fx doesn’t have a sharpen filter which would be an extremely helpful feature given how easily the iPhone picks up the slightest vibration (even your heartbeat) which, in turn, creates a fuzzy picture.

The Tiffen Company has long been recognized as a top developer of photographic lenses and filters. Bringing that expertise to the digital world of photography was a natural direction. The company’s developers have put together a polished, user-friendly iPhone app that will definitely improve the quality of your photos. To really get the most out of your iPhone’s pictures check out our reviews of Photo Only Printers and Inkjet Printers so you can get print your frame-worthy photos.