Mobile photography has acquired an enormous following over the last few years and it is now considered by many an alternative and valid form of visual art, on par with traditional photography. Thanks to the diffusion of mobile devices, even amateurs with no previous experience and with no background in photography are given an easy and accessible form of expression.
The Mobile Photo Awards are addressed to all mobile photographers out there. To take part in the contest, an entry fee of $20 for three images and $30 for five images is required; every image submitted is allowed for inclusion to up to three categories. Categories span a broad spectrum of photography genres, from Architecture to Digital Art & Collage. Specially sponsored app categories offer even more possibilities and hints to get creative. A Jury composed by renown names in the world of mobile photography will be judging all the images submitted. Note that any photo taken/processed with a mobile device is eligible for entry, regardless of the specific medium and software used.
Continue reading “The Mobile Photo Awards – Open for Submissions”
PicFx features several photographic styles that can be applied to photos, from black and white and sepia to other vintage and colored filters. Other than photo styles, PicFx includes a fair collection of items for easy and quick image enhancement, like textures overlays and frames. For obtaining different combinations, images can be filtered over as many times as you wish.
Another addition in FX Photo Studio 4.1 is the Color Splash feature. Color Splash comes with two painting modes, color and grayscale. The brush tool used to apply color or grayscale selectively on images in Color Splash is the same used for masking and thus fully adjustable. For better results, it’s possible to enable panning and zooming.
Finally, FX Photo Studio now preserves EXIF data of your photo, so that all the useful information contained in pictures is retained after saving.
JixiPix’s app offers tone adjustment — for the creation of sepia and other monochrome effects –, sharpness, contrast and brightness sliders. The app also comes with a handy spotlight editing tool. Moving and resizing the ellipse over the image, you can shrink, enlarge and find the right placement for your vignette, thus achieving more or less dramatic lighting. The RGB filter editor will help you in fine-tuning the black and white, blocking off specific color channels, in order to perfectly complement the original image. Dramatic Black & White will let you save your custom presets, so that you can use them more than once and you can also use the app’s randomizing button to generate unexpected effects.
Dramatic Black & White comes with a more than adequate collection of presets which can be fully customized for even more variety. The quality of the effects is excellent and the possibility to save custom presets, as in other apps by JixiPix, means greater flexibility than that offered by most iPhone apps devoted to monochrome. The only black and white app that I can think of that truly allows the same level of customization is Monochromia — which is, in fact, one of my personal favorites for black and white on iPhone. The only thing that could definitely be improved is the rendering times, which are, in spite of updates, still on the slow side.
The Wicker Park hipstapak owes its name to the renown namesake park located in 
The Wicker Park hipstapak is available as in-app purchase with the updated Hipstamatic 225 for $0.99/€0.79/£0.69.
Tune Effect, Straighten and Crop are designed for more thorough editing, as they come with a set of more comprehensive tools for fine-tuning photos. Tune Effect includes brightness, contrast, ambiance and white balance controls; straighten and crop will help in improving framing by fixing crooked images and by removing unnecessary elements.
Snapseed comes also with a focus editor and four sets of different filters and effects, divided into four themed categories: Black and White, Vintage Films, Grunge and Drama. For final touches, a small collection of photographic borders is also included. All filters are top quality and highly customizable.
After editing, it’s possible not only to save the image, but also to print it and share it via email or on Facebook and Flickr. You can always revert to the starting shot and a button in the work area allows you to compare the processed result with the original.
Nik’s Snapseed provides the user with quick and to-the-point instruments for easy enhancement. One of the most notable features of the app is the swiping motion, which allows for quick and accurate visualization of edits. If you imagined from previous experiences that image editing must necessarily be a painful process, then you should try Snapseed to change your mind. Snapseed doesn’t come cheap, but if you are looking for all-around quality editing, you definitely won’t regret getting it.
