Wednesday 30 January 2013

iPad Photo Processing With PicsPlay Pro

Yesterday the iPad app "PicsPlay Pro" was reduced to 69p for a short while so I grabbed a copy. At the time of writing it is still at this reduced price. So far among the many iPad photo apps I have tried out this is far above the others in quality, reliability, ease of use and versatility. On starting you can take a new photo or load one already in the iPad. Once loaded there are choices of cropping, effects, general exposure control, adding text, borders, vignetting, colour splash and many others. Choosing the effects section brings up this screen:

IMG_0308.PNG

Choosing an effect from the left brings up many thumbnails of different ways to apply that effect. This is instant and the thumbnails can be scrolled through and tried at full screen size. No problem if you change your mind as the app has many levels of undo.

I have chosen Art - Sketch. With most, probably all, effects there is a slider which lets you choose any state between the original photo and the full effect. Here I have adjusted the effect to allow some of the original colour to mix with the b/w sketch:

 IMG_0301.JPG

You are not limited to using one effect, many can be used one after the other to build up the result which pleases you. At any and every stage the result can be applied and saved to the iPad Camera Roll, sent to other apps which have the facility to import a photo, emailed, sent to Twitter, Facebook or Flickr. If you use Dropbox then that comes up as one of the 'other apps'.

This started off as a b/w Moon in a black sky:

IMG_0299.JPG

There are far too many different effects in PicsPlay Pro to cover here such as the HDR type effects and the way some can be applied to part of a photo. For me this app was well worth 69p of my pension and would still be a great aquisition at its previous £1.49 It looks as though it could be going up to £2.49 soon.

When I want to get photos in or out of the iPad I use a PC program called iFunBox which allows access to all parts of the iPad much more easily than battling with iTunes.


11 comments:

  1. That looks a very helpful and fun app John. There certainly are lots of useful ones out there. Talking of which, I wonder if you, like me, have been annoyed lately that every time you go to a blogsite on the sidebar it opens in the pared down mobile version. I know there is the option to view in desktop web version but that takes extra time. However I have been thrilled to discover the free browser app Mercury which I think is excellent and in the settings there is the option to set the user agent to either Firefox (my preference) or Chrome which then automatically opens everything in desktop version, I think it's brilliant!!

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  2. Sorry John, on checking the user agent settings on Mercury I see you have the option of Firefox, Chrome, IE or Opera or of course mobile. So it has even more options than I said!

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    1. It's one |I haven;t seen yet Jan. Got your email - none of your comments have gone in my spam folder so far.

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  3. It looks like a bargain.Even at a fiver it would be good value.

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    1. It's nice to have different ways of tweaking the average to poor photos to see what turns up.

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  4. Replies
    1. There's no better alternative to tinkering with gadgets to keep the remaining grey cell active TWG.

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  5. More fun to play around with :) I was wondering if you had ever come across The Automata blog:

    http://blog.dugnorth.com/

    For some reason I couldn't link that site. I ended up spending a great deal of time checking out all of the interesting posts!

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    1. That's what life is about Glo. Thanks for the link - will have a brwse shortly.

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Thank you for visiting. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. Any comment, or correction to any information or identification I get wrong, is most welcome. John

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