Two special offers in the App Store not to be overlooked: King Camera and Iris Photo Suite for iPad are currently on sale! Whereas multi-purpose cameras are often weak either in camera or in editing features, King Camera is capable of handling both aspects of image crafting. As for Iris Photo Suite, this app is what many users described as one of the best Photoshop replacements for iDevices.
Both apps are available at the special price of $0.99/€0.79/£0.69 for a limited time.
Iris Photo Suite is a highly sophisticated collection of tools for iPhone photographers. It comes with a rich set of ready-to-use effects, great for beginners looking for a quick retouch, and with more specialized instruments, for users requiring proper control over the editing process.
Main Features
Appotography Opinion
Iris Photo Suite provides you with several adjustment tools: you can set brightness, contrast and white balance, play with shadows and highlights, define color balance, examine your photo’s histogram and adjust levels. You can use layers and masks to create complex effects or for more refined results. Iris also includes crop and rotate tools, watermark editor, with fairly good font customization (over 100 styles, plus size, color and opacity control), and Color Sense, a selective desaturation/recolor feature, to remove and switch colors in areas of your images.
Additionally, a wide selection of effects is also available, ranging from black and white to artistic filters and from frames to textures. The effects are grouped into eight different categories (Art, Vintage, Grunge, BW, etc.). For each, you can set the strength with a slider and choose to apply it on the whole photo or only selectively with a mask.
Even though the app is quite user-friendly (most actions are performed simply by dragging the sliders’ knobs and you always have a clear preview of what’s going on), some features are not easy to figure out from the very beginning. Layers management and masking can be hard to get used to at first, not for the actual difficulty in controlling them, but rather for learning how they exactly work.
Iris Photo Suite is one of the most complete apps for photographic enhancement and editing available in the App Store. Although recently some competitors (PhotoForge2 and Filterstorm, in special way) added functionalities that Iris lacks, this app is still a more than valid aid to iPhone photographers.
The iPad version of Iris Photo Suite is also available in the App Store.
Overall
Name: Iris Photo Suite
Developer: Pranav Kapoor
Compatibility: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad. iOS 4.2 or later.
Price: £1.19||$1.99||€1.59
Vote: 5/5
Antique monochrome photos have an incredible charm. Most of them not only have a strangely surreal and almost ghostly feel, but also a beautiful painterly quality: for a long time, the influence of painting over photography was very strong and photographers often tried to imitate stylistic principles followed by painters.
With just a few easy steps, I intend on demonstrating how to achieve the evocative feel of aged photos on your iPhone. This is just one of the many processes you can follow.
Apps needed: iCamera HDR, Iris Photo Suite, Plastic Bullet. Optional: Bracket Mode.
1. Take two bracketed exposures of a landscape of your choice. Daylight photos featuring skies with significant detail (huge, fluffy clouds, etc.) will work better. You can either take your exposures directly within iCamera HDR or use Bracket Mode, whatever makes you feel more comfortable. If you already have photos you want to use, jump to step 2. If you have the HDR composite, go to step 3;
2. Merge the exposures in iCamera HDR, choosing Tone Balancer. Adjust the parameters to obtain rich, neatly contrasted details, without exaggerating with overblown brightness, and then save;
3. Open your saved HDR picture in Iris Photo Suite. Tap on the layers icon -> One Touch -> Grunge. For this example, I picked Noise, but you can go for one of the other effects, if it suits your photo better. Leave the value to around 100 or little less, so the effect enhances the contrast of your image. Apply and save;
4. Load the image you just saved on Plastic Bullet. Our aim is to have our final image look like an old, aged picture; Plastic Bullet’s monochromes are particularly convincing for our purpose. Generate random styles by pressing on the refresh button until you obtain something that has the right balance of blur and brightness: we want the picture to look old and deteriorated but we want at the same time to preserve as much detail as it is possible. I decided to go for a dark silver tone with a thick border. When you find a style you like, save to your camera roll and you’re done!
And here is our final result:
