By Graham K. Rogers

Among the updates that were waiting for me in iTunes earlier today was WaterMyPhoto. I had first looked at this interesting water-effects app in October 2011 just as the flooding reached the area in which I lived. The novelty effect of the app, soon became an unpleasant reality for me and many others. This does not reflect on the app in any way. WaterMyPhoto has now been updated, but as the original review was on AMITIAE and the site no longer exists, I am making that updated review available as part of the input for the latest version.

Outline

As I came into the university campus one morning in early October last year, like hundreds of others here and in other parts of Thailand, I had to negotiate flooded roads. With much of the country inundated, we were seeing the ugly side of water.

A couple of years back, at MacWorld, I saw a product demonstrator quickly adding a reflection to an image using Adobe Photoshop. I envied his skills. I have found a free app that allows users to add similar effects to images on the iPhone and the iPad: the aptly-named, WaterMyPhoto. This has recently been updated and is now at version 1.5 (see below).

WaterMyPhoto

Right at the bottom of the screen are two additional items: Remove ads, which showed a $1.99 charge; and "Other Fun Apps, which revealed apps that were available like Fab Life and MySketch.

From the photo album, I first selected a Khmer head that I had seen in an outdoor exhibition at the Siam Paragon mall in central Bangkok. It opened in a Resize and Crop page with a red rectangle controlling the output. Once done, the image was processed and appeared on screen, but with moving water ripples beneath. At this stage I had two options: Change Photo and Done Editing.

The first of these took me back to the main page. I went back to the same photo from the library and that was processed quickly again. This time I pressed Done Editing. A thumbnail version of the finished image was displayed with a rotate button alongside. Pressing this once rotated the image 90 degrees clockwise (each time).

Below were 6 export options: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, email and Save Photo. To these has now been aded Instagram. I emailed the image and saved a copy in the album. Earlier I was slightly disappointed to find that the saved image was 390 x 502 (68KB) although this has now improved. With the email, I was given 3 options of small, medium and large, with the latter at 1.4MB. This is a vast improvement, but needs to be matched with the Photo Album image saving.

To take a photo, I wanted to go back to Step 1, but had to use Step 2 first and use Change Photo. That only took a moment, but it might have been easier just to have been able to press Step 1.

When the photograph is taken, like many such apps there is the opportunity to discard or Use. As with the library image I had tried first, I was then allowed to crop and resize the image. A change has occurred with the latest update and instead of going to Step 2, with every photograph I tried, I was directed to an Information screen which was an advertisement for other apps from the developer. It was easy enough to press Cancel, but this became obtrusive. Also more noticeable was the increased size of advertisements at the bottom of the panels.

Compare the earlier version (above, right) with the latest (below).

In Step 2 the photograph appeared with the rippling effect -- a nice touch. It was good enough to fool a colleague for a moment when I showed him that my office (on Floor 5) was flooded too.

When the user is satisfied, a Done Editing button is pressed which reveals a revised Step 3 panel. As well as the ability to rotate an image, there were four output choices: Normal, Black and White, Sepia and Negative. The last may need careful selection: not all images will work well with this effect, while the other new effects -- Black & White and Sepia -- often add to an image.

With all the buttons and choices on this panel, the size of the image view has decreased and it may be necessary to return to Step 2 if a user needs to examine the image again.

Comments

WaterMyPhoto is a pleasing, simple to use app that has little wrong with it. It is straightforward when used. Although I tried this on the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S, it will also install on the iPad. There are no unnecessary frills and the images produced look just fine. It still needs a little tidying up and a rethink about the display of the "Information" page as well as the over-use of advertising within the app.

With the update to Version 1.5, the developers have added a couple of nice export features to the app and changed the interfacing subtly so that sharing and final editing are easily done in a single screen.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.