1001 Awesome Filters: Not So Awesome

When browsing through the App Store, one is inevitably drawn to some apps that seem to boast about their greatness with self-referential exaggerations and more than bombastic descriptions. However, very often apps that need to rely on these tricks as means of attraction are apps that are not worth your time — and money. Why is that? Maybe because if you truly have good material you don’t need to show off — results will definitely speak for themselves?

Main Features

• Up to 640×480 pixels (3GS);
• Filter on/off;
• Flash on/off (on supported devices);
• 140+ colored filters;
• Seven series of filtering masks;
• Four levels of intensity for each filter;
• Integrated photo viewer.

Appotography Opinion

Simply put, this 1001 Awesome Filters is another app you should forget about. It doesn’t matter how many filters the developers say you have at your disposal, when none of these is even remotely good. The filters in this app are quite cheap-looking, especially the masks, and they don’t blend organically with most photos; more than improving your photo, you  will risk to spoil it utterly without having a second chance. Using 1001 Awesome Filters Digital Camera is quite confusing, especially at first: navigating through the filters is clunky and time-consuming. In general, the interface of 1001 Awesome Filters is not intuitive and buttons are not handy at all, first of all because of their size, and secondly for their poor responsiveness. The preview is not accurate enough to have a precise idea of the final outcome, and you have to use a filter several times in order to know more or less how your image will be affected. Even if you get the hang of this app, you cannot do much with the presets you are given anyway — you can only choose to change their intensity level after your photo is taken. Most filters resemble one another anyway, so there isn’t much variety to begin with. In the current version, you can only process images taken with the built-in camera, not those you have in your camera roll. This also means the photo viewer is quite useless a feature.

It’s very easy, when you have not a clue about what high quality photographic effects are, to develop a product and sell it adding adjectives as “awesome”, etc. or suggestive numbers to its name to impress buyers. Accept the fact this approach won’t fool everybody, especially when there are so many other apps that are truly deserving available on the market. LOL Software seems to be more interested in developing heaps of apps of  any existing genre than focusing on less products and develop them more carefully. Too bad. If if it’s true this method can work for some categories of applications, it’s also true it doesn’t work very well with photographic apps, because to develop them not only you have to be very careful in creating a well-balanced and functional product, but you also have to have a good discerning eye.

An update was announced some time ago, so we hope that some of these issues will be solved and that we will be able to reconsider our current opinion.

Overall

Name: 1001 Awesome Filters – Digital Camera
Developer: LOL Software
Compatibility: iPhone, iPod Touch. iOS 3.0 or later.
Price: £0.59||$0.99||€0.79
Vote: 1/5

Tagged as: 1001 Awesome Filters, filters collection, LOL Software