App Aims: Turning Ho-Hum iPhone Photos Into Your Personal Masterpieces

Reviewer’s Comments
Are you the Ansel Adams of smartphone photography? Perhaps you hanker after the title of Pixel Picasso? If you’re a shutterbug of the iPhone variety, The Tiffen Company’s Photo fx app is right up your alley.

The Tiffen Company is an industry-leader in developing and producing photographic filters and lens accessories for over 70 years. They’ve ventured into the digital world of photography with a software package and two iPhone apps, Photo fx and Cool fx. One of the biggest knocks against the iPhone and iPhone 3G is the relatively low quality 2 mega-pixel camera with no flash. Photo fx provides 26 filters organized into 5 different filter groups to give you the ability to tweak and polish your iPhone pics on the fly rather than waiting until you have access to a computer.

Photo fx’s six categories have 74 filters:

Face fx

• Black Pro-Mist®
• Center Spot
• Pro-Mist®
• Soft/FX®

Outer fx

• Color-Grad®
• Day for Night
• Enhancer
• Fog
• Polarizer
• Ultra Contrast

Fun fx

• Color Spot
• Infrared (6)
• Looks (27)
• Pencil
• Reflector (2)
• Star

Classic fx

• Black and White (6)
• Old Photo (9)
• Tint
• Vignette (4)

Wild fx

• Glow
• Halo
• High Contrast
• Night Vision
• Two Strip
• Three Strip

Features of Photo fx:

• Crop, rotate and straighten photos
• Modify each filter (and style) with sliders, on-screen controls or presets
• Add multiple filters without saving
• Shake on the Filter 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

One of the very few drawbacks we encountered as we used Photo fx was that there isn’t a sharpen filter/function which is almost de rigueur given the sensitivity of the iPhone’s accelerometer practically guarantees you’ll have slightly fuzzy pictures. It’s a bit difficult to tell the difference between Photo fx and Cool fx. On the surface Photo fx appears to have more filters, while in actuality, Cool fx has more than twice that number of filters. Photo fx is still a valuable app because it contains the filters that Cool fx doesn’t such as the Face fx filters. As the developer has said, the two apps compliment each other. They each function well on their own and although they share a few of the same filters, they both have features that are unique.

Historically, software packages that hardware companies put out tend to look and feel very raw and clumsy. In the case of Photo fx, this is simply not the case. The interface is polished and smooth and the filters are powerful enough to yield good results, yet not so complex that they’re intimidating. Overall the app is perfect for the casual photos the iPhone creates. Be sure to read our review of Photo fx’s sister app, Cool fx. To really get the most out of your iPhone’s pictures check out our reviews of Digital Photo Printing sites so you can get great prints of the masterpieces that are worthy of framing.