By Graham K. Rogers

I have several hundred apps for the iPhone now, and a great many are connected to photography: editing, filters, adjustment, special effects. You would think I have enough. I do not need them all of course. I do not need any more. Then once in a while a new app comes along that has that extra something. Photo Editor by Aviary is just one such app which has a second major advantage in that it is free.

Photo Editor by Aviary

A difference is apparent the moment the opening screen with the app's logo has cleared. As well as access to camera and library for input sources, images from the Camera Roll are displayed center-screen, with the most recent first. We may scroll through these and edit any one by pressing an icon below. There are also icons for access to the camera or the Gallery. Each of these icons is beautifully designed in an embossed-style. The same attention to detail is evident throughout the app.

Editing Tools

The first group is Enhance, Effects, Stickers, Orientation and Crop. Enhance has 4 options: Auto, Night, Backlit and Balance. Effects are accessed via a film-roll icon that contains 10 filters. There is only one installed (Original) while others can be downloaded for $0.99 each. Those available are Grunge, Nostalgia and Viewfinder (which I bought as an in-App purchase). Crop has a selection of 7 settings plus original and Custom.

Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and Sharpness are in the second group and each of these attributes of an image an be adjusted with a horizontal wheel giving a high degree of accuracy when applying an effect.

Also on the second screen is Draw with a scrolling selector for brush sizes above a similar selector for colours. There is also an eraser at the beginning and end of the color selector. As any selection is made, a small display is shown over the image for about a second.

The final screen has four tools: Text, Redeye, Whiten and Blemish. Text appears to have only one font available, but there is a color selector available after characters are typed in. A novel feature here is a button on the text box that allows it to be rotated. Redeye, Whiten and Blemish each has a selector for brush sizes, so there is a fair degree of accuracy when these effects are used.

Settings

Tool order shows the default setting, but by pressing Edit, a user may either delete any of the tools or slide them up or down for a different display order. as useful as this may be for some, I left this alone.

The Maximum Save Size is important for me and many apps have disappointed because the output has been too small for me to work with. There are three options here with maxima up to 3MP, 5MP and 12MP. Beneath each of the settings is a description of the value of each, so for 3MP, we read, "Best for quick saves and basic sharing."

The output that I achieved with the best setting was an image of 8MP (1.78 MB) when using a photograph from the Photo Album. When I used a photograph taken with the iPhone camera, I still only saw an image of 2448 x 3264 (8MP) with a larger file size of 2.70 MB. Exporting this as a full-size 16-bit TIFF image from Aperture produced a photograph of 35" x 43.3" with a file size of 48 MB: quite respectable really.

In the settings there is also a link for Help and Support, which opens Safari and a second link for Developers (also via Safari): "Get this Editor!" On the Aviary website there is a SDK available for download so that the app can "blend seamlessly" with another developer's app.

Comments

The range of tools and the thought that has gone into their design is really quite unusual even considering the range of quality output we normally see from developers of iOS apps.

I am unusually impressed with the range of tools that are available here coupled with the ease of use. A video on the developer site show how easily changes can be made. If this were an app costing $0.99 or $1.99 (or even more) I would be pleased with it.

As a free app, this leaves me grasping for superlatives. It puts many paid apps in the shade.

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.