By Graham K. Rogers

There may be some willing to argue that the photographic output from a smartphone is never going to be as good as that from SLR camera, but this ignores the point that most users do not have expensive cameras, find them cumbersome in day to day situations and just want pictures that look fine on social networking sites.

Background

Most of the time I neither want nor need such high quality and the iPhone will suffice, also allowing me to edit before I upload to Facebook or my website. I am not alone in this. The apps used for output carry a greater importance, particularly if special effects are desired.

On Friday a number of sites were reporting on the latest update to a photography app for iOS devices, called Wood Camera: so named because the developers have a soft spot for the output of older devices. The app itself is quite a reasonable solution for image manipulation, and the latest issue (version 2) has many new features.

One of the reasons the app has had such a good first day in the various sources I saw may lie in the excellent Press Kit that was available and from which I have borrowed. Information concerning the release of an app along with a selection of pre-prepared images of the app as well as samples of output is almost unprecedented. All of the package, including the text information, was well-thought out. The developers, Bright Mango, are serious about this.

When I arrived home from work on Friday evening, a look in the iTunes store (I was downloading music - Bo Ningen, Line The Wall to be precise) and a look at the App Store showed me that Wood Camera was listed as the Number One download. I made the $0.99 purchase right away. I also followed that with a number of other apps using the links to what others had also downloaded. Wood Camera is a nicely put together app. It does what it is designed to do, and does it well.

Wood Camera

At the top of the screen are 3 controls: a gearwheel for settings; a grid-size adjuster; and an Export button. At the bottom is access to the Camera Roll, a button for the camera and a greyed out button marked Paste Photo.

There are three on-off settings: GeoTagging, which retains the coordinates for any captured photo; Camera Roll, to add any images directly (minus lens effects) to the Photo Library; and Capture Mode, which access the camera instead of the library, when the app is started. At the bottom of the Settings screen is a button to reset all tutorials.

Tapping an image in the library panel brings it up full screen. To the top left is a Close button and to the right, a button marked Edit. At the bottom of this Detail screen are buttons for Export and Trash.

Editing

At the bottom of the screen are 6 controls. The first (on the left) is a dual control for rotation (in 90 degree increments) and straightening, with a slider. A Crop button gives four options for crop shapes plus None. The lens access displays all 32 options, a well as 6 sliders to adjust Intensity, Brightness, Contrast, Sharpening, Saturation and Hue, giving an unusual level of control to each image output, but in a basic, easy-to-use way. There are also some 28 filters that add distressed effects to an image (see my review on DistressedFX), along with a slider to temper the effect.

An icon like a loupe provides Tilt-Shift adjustments and Vignetting. Both use sliders to adjust the intensity but the area (round or horizontal) that Tilt-Shift affects may be adjusted using a two-finger pinch. Finally, there are 16 frame options, two of which add flying birds to the image. I am dubious of the value of such frames.

As each effect is used, so the icon that accesses the options changes from white to orange.

Exporting and Comments

When a user exports images, there are several options: camera roll, email, Twitter, Facebook, Fickr, Instagram, as well as "Dropbox and others". Selecting this last option crashed the app the first time I tried it, but the next time I was offered 12 apps that were available on my iPhone for me to use, including the print apps (Epson, and HP) I have.

I saved images both to the camera roll and via email. The best email option I was given was 2.3 MB (actual size) for a photograph taken in Wood Camera. Another a short while later with several adjustments was 1 MB. Both the JPG and a full size 8-bit TIFF image - exported from Aperture after transfer from the iPhone Photo Library via Photo Stream - were shown as 27.8" x 45" with a resolution of 72 dpi.

I did install this app on the iPad, although I rarely use this device for taking pictures. Many do, though, so this makes the app relevant to them. The rubric in the iTunes App Store does mention the iPad but tells users that Wood Camera is optimized for the iPhone 5. It displayed on the iPad that I use in the x1 and x2 screen sizes. It is easy to use because of the bigger screen, but its real home is the iPhone.

Wood Camera is a reasonably easy to use app for those interested in photography using an iOS device at its $0.99 price, this is well worth looking at.

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.