Distressed FX is a sweet little app for iPhone and iPad that uses textures to turn photos into aged and battered images with an artistic flair. The app has just enough features for this purpose, which is perfectly fine, as so many do-all apps include at least a few textures among their effects but they are not especially designed for this; as a result their textures do not always blend nicely with photos. As I said other times, texturing takes more than just sticking a random layer over a picture; first of all, it starts with versatile textures.
Main Features
- Full resolution saving available;
- Square format;
- 16 textures;
- 21 overlays;
- Adjust texture and overlay brightness, contrast and saturation;
- Adjust texture and overlay opacity;
- Oval and linear blur;
- In-app guide;
- Send via email and to Dropbox;
- Share on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
Appotography Opinion
Distressed FX lets you choose among taking a picture with the in-app camera or importing one from your device’s albums. Images are cropped into the square format before effects can be applied to them. In the main working screen, you can access a series of textures and colored overlays which you can combine together for different looks. You can switch between the two by tapping on the icon in the bottom right corner of your working area.
Both textures and overlays are adjustable allowing to regulate various settings for blending the filters with the original image. You have sliding controls for brightness, contrast, saturation and opacity. The settings can be accessed by tapping on the sliders icon located in the top left corner of the working area.
The blur feature is a nice extra and it works very nicely with the provided textures. There are two types of blur you can apply, as in most tilt-shift generators: round and linear. By dragging and pinching on the screen, you can move and resize the blurred area. Note that applying blur does not affect the texture but only the original photo, so you can bring elements in and out of focus without messing up the overall look of the image.
Finally, the images processed with Distressed FX can be saved to your device’s album, sent via email, uploaded to Dropbox, or shared on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Distressed FX doesn’t come with a gazillion of different effects, filters and features, making it very easy to use even for a beginner. The texture-overlay combinations are not endless, but they give users enough variety to work with. The textures included are quite attractive and usable, too — which is an essential requirement several texture-based apps seem unable to fulfill.
Here are a few additional images processed with Distressed FX.
The main flaw I could find in Distressed FX is the app’s slowness. I only tested it on iPhone 4S, but even with no other apps running in the background, Distressed FX was either slow or not fully responsive at times; this issue I encountered not necessarily while processing the images, but especially when trying to save them.
Even with its minor problems, Distressed FX is a very simple tool that can give you lots of fun and pleasing results in just a few taps, and of course, the best part is finding the perfect recipes for your photos. The app is great both used alone or together with others, and I especially recommend it to people who are after that graceful timeworn look for their photos.
Name: Distressed FX
Publisher: We Are Here
Compatibility: iOS 4.3 or later.
Price: $0.99||£0.69||€0.89
Vote: 4/5
Thanks to Cheryl Tarrant for providing us with the promo codes for Distressed FX.
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