Pholeido Review

A bit of everything can result in an insipid recipe.

by Pu on August 4, 2011

Pholeido is not only a photo editing app with several tools and effects to retouch and spice up your pictures, but also a photo community where you can share your images with other members.

Main Features

  • Full resolution available;
  • Grid on/off;
  • Self-timer;
  • Flash on/off (only on supported devices);
  • 15 borders;
  • 11 photographic effects;
  • 9 fun effects;
  • Crop, resize and rotate;
  • Adjust saturation, color, brightness, contrast;
  • Adjust focus, blur, sharpness;
  • Red eye remover;
  • 24 bubble styles;
  • 27 cliparts;
  • 100+ available fonts;
  • Undo;
  • Send via email or share Pholeido, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr.

Appotography Opinion

Pholeido lets you import photos from your Camera Roll and in addition offers a built-in camera equipped with self-timer (5,10,15 seconds delay) and rule of thirds grid. Photos, either taken in-app or imported, can be edited before sharing them.

A series of tools are available to retouch images. Various presets, like basic sepia and black and white, oil painting and sketch filters, blend modes (eight in all), tint, solarize and negative, allow a quick edit, while more control can be achieved by adjusting brightness, contrast, saturation and color settings together with blur and sharpening. Most of these tools feature adjustment sliders. The collection of Pholeido photographic tools counts also a red eye remover. Other effects which can applied are different types of distortion (mirror, fisheye, warp, swirl, among others) and cliparts to be used as stickers. Adding text and speech bubbles is also possible. For a final touch, you can add a frame and change its color to match your picture (matching won’t be easy though, as there are only a few colors to choose from, anyway).

Once you are done with editing, you develop the photo, which at this point can be sent using email or shared on several social networks, including Pholeido’s community.
Pholeido iPhone
The app’s community works more or less like any other community: you upload your photos and decide whether you prefer to share them with everybody or with your approved contacts only. You can set permissions for each contact separately. For example, you can decide to share photos with some of your contacts only. Other than sharing, you can browse photos uploaded by your contacts in your feed or search for popular and nearby entries. Users can comment and like photos from other community members. It is not required to have a community account in order to use the photo app.

Pholeido iPhone

The plain white border is the only one I actually like.

One the most annoying elements in Pholeido is the wavy effect that is applied to photos during processing times. Was it supposed to offer distraction to the user? Was it the first thing developers could come up with? Is it totally random? I am confused. There are other confusing things in Pholeido, like blend modes, that are mysteriously hidden behind an effect called “Bloom”, or the fact you can apply as many effects as you like, but you only have a single undo. In general, a few of the effects are nice, like the black and white and the vintage ones, but most of them are nothing more than average. Frames and cliparts are sort of generic as well and they include a variety of cliched items, from wanted poster to Santa Claus hat. Processing times are unusually long. It feels like this app offers very limited possibilities and it was developed without a coherent idea. Pholeido tries to please everybody without really being successful at pleasing anybody.

Overall

Name: Pholeido
Developer: Fingertip Access LLC
Compatibility: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad. iOS 3.1 or later.
Price: £0.69||$0.99||€0.79
Vote: 3/5

Pholeido - Fingertip Access LLC

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post: