iPhone camera apps that will bring out your best photographer

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Camera+ offers a private photoroll.

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Updated: July 18, 2011 4:26PM

It’s rare when a company treats a smartphone camera as anything more than just a number in a comparison chart. “Is the number associated with the camera we’ve put in this year’s model higher than the one we put in last year’s model? And is it equal to or greater than the number associated with our competitors?” is about as deep as the engineering conversation seems to go at most companies.

If the answers to those two questions are “yes” and “yes” respectively (or in any order, really), then they slap the “Good Enough” stamp on that section of the project and move on.

Which is a damned shame. That becomes apparent the first time you own a phone with a great camera, like the iPhone 4. Yes, the worst iPhone snaps are far worse than the worst ones from any of my traditional cameras, but when the iPhone is great, it’s damned great. When I take a tour through my Flickr stream, I often can’t tell which photos were taken with my iPhone unless I check the EXIF info.

That’s partly due to the hardware built into the phone but the photography apps you add in yourself play just as important a role in elevating the iPhone from a snapshot-taker and a device that generates content for your Twitter and Facebook streams to a real camera that’s capable of actual photography.

I rely on a specific all-star collection of apps that helps me turn the desire to walk away with a great shot into, well...a great shot. Each one handles a different aspect of the picture-taking business.

For Snapping Photos: Camera+ by tap tap tap ($1.99)

I’ll be honest and say that I rely on the iPhone’s built-in Camera app for 99% of my normal, everyday picture taking. That’s not out of laziness. Despite competition from scads of apps that promise additional features and improvements over what’s pre-installed, Apple’s own app remains the shortest, straightest and most reliable line between “Ooo! I should take a picture of that!” and getting a picture of that . . . ideally with the right bits of the scene properly exposed and in focus.

Camera+, like the other third-party apps, is flawed in the sense that it doesn’t understand that I launched this app because I want to take a photo right now. It gets distracted by its own ample stable of added features. But it’s a lovely collection of features and all together, it’s a fine package for not a lot of money. It delivers:

A motion stabilizer. When you tap the shutter button, the app waits until the iPhone’s motion sensor tells it that you’re holding the phone steady enough for a clear shot and then it takes the picture. When there isn’t much light and your iPhone is practically guaranteed to use a slow shutter speed, this feature can be the difference between A Lovely Photo and something that’s so bad you can’t even use it on Facebook.

A self-timer. Self-explanatory. “But I’ll never put my iPhone on a tripod and take photos of myself!” you say. Yes, but remember when you wanted to take a goofy self-portrait of yourself and your pal and you spent thirty seconds trying to tap the shutter button you couldn’t see because the screen was facing away from you? Good. I didn’t even have to tell you how useful a self-timer would have been when you took that night photo of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. You could have set the self-timer, propped the iPhone up on top of a mailbox, and had a gorgeous snap.

(But I will remind you of the last time you handed your camera to someone and asked “Could you take a photo of me and my sweetie in front of [cool landmark]?” and had to maintain a stiff smile while explaining that yes, it’s the button with the little picture of a camera on it. With Camera+ you can just start the self-timer and hand over the phone. All this person has to do is hold the camera and the picture will happen.)

A private photoroll. It makes perfect sense for the iPhone to have a central photoroll that can be accessed by all apps (you couldn’t do very much with your photos otherwise).

It also makes sense that you might take a few photos that you want to be verrrryyyyyyy careful with. Surely you’ve been reading the news.

If you take a photo with Apple’s Camera app, it goes into the iPhone’s communal photo library. If you take a photo with Camera+, it goes into a photoroll that only Camera+ can access until you choose to move the picture into the main iPhone library.

This means that when you’re in the Twitter app and you want to post a photo of an awesome burger you had for lunch, there’s no chance that you’ll accidentally tap the wrong tiny, inscrutable thumbnail and post the wrong photo. Meaning: you won’t be forced to explain to all of your friends, family members, co-workers, and your wife that you only tried on the Wonder Woman bustier because you were amazed that the costume shop actually had them in that size and it was right next to the Colonial Marine costume you’d come in to rent.

Camera+ also has a pile of art filters (they’re fun, but I like my photos to look like photos) and some basic editing tools.

I obviously like the app. I just wish it were more reliable. Just now, while playing with it for a few minutes here at my desk, I was reminded why I don’t use it as a direct substitute for the Camera app. You almost always have to wait a little while for Camera+ to get its act together and by the time it’s ready to shoot (or, worse, by the time you’ve forced the app to restart) the moment has long-passed. Apple’s app can be a little squirrelly sometimes but it remains the best tool for getting the shot.

Edit Photos: Photo fx by The Tiffen Company ($2.99)

The Tiffen name will be familiar to many photographers: for decades, it’s been synonymous with conventional glass photo filters. You want to correct a yellowish tint created by incandescent lights? Add a filter. They’ve made an exceptional smartphone photo editing app by maintaining that same mindset.

The app wins by not attempting to deliver the full power and fury of Photoshop. It understands the desires of the user. You’ve got this photo and you’d just like it to look better. So after you’ve either taken a photo with the app or you’ve selected an existing image from your iPhone’s photo library, Photo fx shows you thumbnail previews of what that image would look like, after any of a number of fixes have been applied.

For instance, I’ve got this shot of a park squirrel was taken on a hazy winter day, which means there’s a light bluish color cast on it. The “Temperature” thumbnail looks very nice. If I tap it, Photo fx will present me with a another batch of thumbnail previews, showing me various degrees of Warming (make it redder/more yellowy) and Cooling (make it bluer). I tap the preview that I like the best. Done.

I can “stack” these effects, so that I can sharpen this squirrel after I’ve warmed it up. Quickly, an OK image turns into a great one.

Pretty much every popular filter in the Tiffen catalogue is represented. The kids on the beach look great but the sky’s just a blaze of overexposed white. So you drop a graduated filter. It’ll darken the sky and leave the rest alone.

You can also make adjustments in a more conventional way by pushing sliders around, and there are even some painting tools if you want to put your fingerprints on your images. Oh, and it also includes dull but indispensable tools like rotating and cropping.

But Photo fx’s mighty collection of filter adjustments and the “pick the one that looks prettiest” interface are what make the app best-in-class, though.

Shoot panoramas: AutoStitch Panorama by Cloudburst Research ($1.99)

The most impressive iPhone apps are the ones that just plain work without any needless muss or fuss. A powerful app that keeps all of its muscle under the hood. All the user sees are its awesome results.

AutoStitch is such an app.

But first, a pitch for panoramas. Phone camera lenses tend to be wide-angle (the better to snap one-handed portraits of yourself with a pal) but they’re never wide enough to take in an entire space. The vast courtyard before the Temple of Supreme Harmony in Beijing’s Forbidden City was designed some 600 years ago to humble those who had business with the Imperial court. It’ll certainly humble the hell out of your camera lens. No way are you going to capture it in one shot.

So instead, you “paint” the entire scene with your camera. You methodically pivot your camera -- tip: not your body, just the camera -- through the entire width of the scene, and then use desktop software that analyzes that pile of shots and assembles them into what will hopefully be a seamless image.

Panoramas are a healthy part of your balanced photographic breakfast. Particularly when you travel. Nothing can rekindle that “sense of place” like a panorama. You should be shooting panoramic sets just as a matter of course, every time you’re someplace Interesting.

AutoStitch represents the hugely right way to do such an app on an iPhone. Take a series of photos using any camera app you like. Then launch AutoStitch, select the photos from your picture library, and release the hounds. Within a minute, the app spits out a gorgeous, ultra-high-resolution panorama that looks like a single flawless exposure. Usually, there are no seamlines and it adjusts the exposure of each image so that everything matches up. It’s desktop-class; often, an AutoStitch panorama will look better than the output of Adobe Photoshop Elements autostitcher, when working from the same pile of source photos.

There’s one prominent runner-up in this category: “Photosynth,” by a plucky young upstart called “Microsoft.” What a slick app. The star of the show is its panorama-shooting mode. The app uses your iPhone’s sensors to track how you’ve been moving it. All you need to do is hold your iPhone steady and rotate it smoothly. Every time the app senses that you’re aiming the lens at a part of the scene it hasn’t recorded yet, it automatically takes another photo. You can see a preliminary version of the panorama as you shoot, so there’s never any question that you’ve covered the whole scene.

Until a very recent update, Photosynth had a dealbreaking limitation: you couldn’t just save a panorama to your camera roll. You had to upload it to Photosynth.net, and that site was the only way to view your panorama. They fixed that a couple of weeks ago.

But it’s still left with a major problem: its mechanism for automatically snapping panoramic elements is easy, but your iPhone is in motion while the app is capturing images. So the results are rarely terribly sharp. And it appears to be grabbing video frames instead of full 5-megapixel images, so there are limits to how much detail it can happen. Also, it’s not quite as good at blending and merging images together as AutoStitch. I can confidently print out an AutoStitch panorama and hang it on my wall, two feet wide. Not so with Photosynth.

Still, Photosynth is a hell of a lot of fun and, jeez, it’s free.

It’s Impossible To Explain What This App Does In One Phrase, But Seriously, Just Get It: SynthCam by Marc Levoy (Free)

All I can do is explain the concept of this remarkable app. The iPhone normally takes photographs like a conventional still camera. Click goes the shutter, light hits the image sensor, a packet of data is written to the camera roll as an image file.

SynthCam uses an interesting twist. It takes photos using the video camera. You click a “record” button and then a few seconds later, click it again. SynthCam then fuses the immense pile of 720P HD frames it collected during that time into a single image.

The best way to describe the results is for you to imagine that you’ve got the iPhone locked down on a tripod and you’ve got it aimed at a flag on a flagpole. SynthCam will spit out a photo in which the flagpole is in crisp focus. Each individual frame of that flagpole only contributed a fraction of the ultimate image, but it didn’t change from frame to frame so they all merged into one sharp object. But the flag was flapping around. It was in the same rough location but never really stayed still. So all of those marginally-different flappy versions of the flag merged into a colorful blur.

Okay? Does that make sense?

The best way to see what it does it to just play with the app. It has only one real control, and it’s a bit confusing: you can force the app to keep a certain specific point (or a collection of points) in focus. Even if you’re holding the iPhone in your shaky hands, you’ve told the app to please try to line up all of the video frames so that this bit right here appears sharp in the final photo.

SynthCam’s unique approach to photo-taking can be exploited to simulate a bunch of conventional camera effects that you can’t get on your iPhone any other way:

Shallow depth of field/selective focus. The sign in the foreground is sharp; the pasture behind it is blurry.

Motion blur from ultra-long shutter speeds. A river is spilling over a dam. The dam is stationary, the water is moving...so the dam looks perfectly normal but the water looks like thick smoke. On a traditional camera, you’d get this effect by putting a super-dark filter over the lens and exposing this daylight scene for a full second or two instead of just one five-hundredth.

Low-grain images in low light. Again: elements of the scene that stay the same from moment to moment are clear and everything that changes blurs together. A digital camera deals with low light by jacking up the sensitivity of the image sensor, which results in loads of staticky-looking noise all over everything. But! This noise is random. Meaning, it doesn’t say the same from frame to frame. So if your iPhone is locked down (on a tripod, propped up against something, or just held very, very still) the things that are actually real objects in the frame will be sharp and all of the random high-sensitivity noise will blur together and disappear. Result: practically zero high-ISO noise.

SynthCam is an exciting app because it’s a simple premise (albeit one that’s hard to grok without hands-on experience) that can be exploited in lots of cool ways. It really encourages you to play with it and see how it’ll react to different situations.

It reminds me of how radically-different my approach to photography has become since I started owning phones with halfway-decent cameras. Taking pictures used to be a big event. Either because I was literally at a big event of some kind or because I’d set out with a camera in my pocket with the specific intent of getting some good photos.

With a decent camera feature and a batch of highly specialized photo apps on the phone that’s with me every time I leave the house, photography becomes more playful. Some people play a game or graze at the endless trough of triviata served up by the Facebook app when they have ten or fifteen minutes to kill. I’m messing around with photo apps, as often as not.

All right, yes, for every memorable panorama or cunning street scene, there are about ninety dull still-lifes of the items on a restaurant table upon which my lunch has yet to be deposited. But hey, at least it keeps me out of Farmville.