I’m a sucker for messing around with photo apps on my godphone. I go through phases where I need to try out apps that totally mess up photos, and then I revert to wanting more realistic captures. Lather, rinse, repeat. Lately, I’ve come back to Instagram, simply because it’s so fracking fast at processing the photos. Very little delay between shutter and moving on – I’ve really wanted to like Infinicam, Hipstamatic, and ShakeItPhoto, but they are frustratingly slow to process the photos.
Now, I’m playing with a couple of new apps. Camera Awesome is a new (free) app that adds some funky filters and composition aids. Seems like a very cool app, and is fast enough in workflow, but slow at saving the processed photo to the phone’s Camera Roll. It can also export quasi-automagically to a bunch of third party services, but not WordPress.
The other app I’m playing with, Decim8 (app store link, because their website kind of sucks…), goes in the opposite direction, away from faux-retro-analog, and into exploring what kinds of funky digital artifacts can be generated. It’s also dog-slow at processing the photos, but the effects can be kind of amazing. Like Tron meets Matrix. And you can mix and combine effects and save custom presets, which are all rendered fresh each time, so the exact effect is never the same twice. Ephemeral glitches. Awesome.
And then Snapseed, which looks like a really powerful photo app, with much more control over the effects… (thanks to a nudge from Michael Smith to give that one another shot…)
The apps are fun, but still aren’t optimal. What I need is an app that is quick to load, quick to process, and automatically saves the processed photos into the phone’s Camera Roll (bonus points for background processing). I don’t need built-in sharing or anything. Just shoot, process, save, repeat…