iPhone photo editing

So, I think every­one can agree that the biggest weak­ness of every incarn­a­tion of the iPhone (until the iPhone 4 came along) has been its cam­era. Incap­able of macro pho­to­graphy, sus­cept­ible to motion blur, near impossible to use except when out­side on a very sunny day — a rar­ity in Glas­gow — and gen­er­ally very weak even in those conditions.

Des­pite this, I still use it often to take pic­tures of little things I see when out and about. Much as I would like to take my proper DSLR with me every­where I go, the risk of per­man­ent shoulder dam­age leaves me reach­ing for my iPhone most often and won­der­ing what I can do to dis­guise its shortcomings.

One solu­tion is to Pho­toshop your pic­tures to death. (Apo­lo­gies to Adobe for the inap­pro­pri­ate ‘verbing’ of your trade­mark, but it’s a bit less of a mouth­ful than “use Adobe Pho­toshop™ to manip­u­late your image”.)  A little bit of mess­ing around with sat­ur­a­tion, curves and the chan­nel mixer should hide some of the worst of the iPhone camera’s sins, though will likely be left with some­thing a little unnat­ural looking.

By way of example, here is a pic­ture of a sun­flower stand I took at east London’s Columbia Road flower mar­ket. Just in case it isn’t obvi­ous, the pic­ture on the left is as taken by the iPhone and the one on the right is after some quick Photoshopping.

Not the best example, I grant you, but it shows what can be done with about a minute in Pho­toshop. A much more vibrant image, and while still quite grainy, is some­what more pleas­ant to look at than the original.

The other, slightly less time con­sum­ing (in terms of hav­ing to trans­fer files) but rather restric­ted option is to use the free Adobe Pho­toshop Express app on the iPhone itself. Along­side basic func­tions like crop­ping, con­trast, sat­ur­a­tion etc., it has a num­ber of pre­set effects and bor­ders. The effects are pretty hor­rible in truth, but hav­ing the abil­ity to do a little basic edit­ing before upload­ing a pic­ture to, say, Twit­ter while you’re on the move is pretty handy. Here’s an example of a photo swiftly edited using Pho­toshop Express on my phone:

I had to add a thin black bor­der so you can see the white bor­der on the right one, but other than that these are both as they were on the phone. A little con­trast shift, crop­ping, some sharpen­ing and desat­ur­a­tion has made the pic­ture slightly more inter­est­ing (if a little cheesy, and I real­ise it isn’t really a very inter­est­ing pic­ture to start with but it was an easy example.)

Finally, the most dan­ger­ous of three tech­niques: the Hip­sta­matic app. The Hip­sta­matic 100 was a cheap plastic point & shoot cam­era developed in the 1980’s by two art school dro­pouts, but never reached mass pro­duc­tion due to their untimely deaths at the hands of a drunk driver. The iPhone app has brought back the vin­tage look of the camera’s shots, and to a far wider audi­ence than the cam­era itself ever had. It cer­tainly does pro­duce some inter­est­ing res­ults and does a pretty good job of hid­ing the iPhone camera’s flaws:

Again the black bor­der is purely there so that the bor­ders cre­ated by the app are vis­ible. With a (vir­tual) choice of lenses, film and flashes, it does make what would be fairly dull pic­tures a bit more inter­est­ing, but the poten­tial for over­use is high. Use very spar­ingly for greater effect.

So there are my three ways to hide the short­com­ings of my phone cam­era. I’m a self-confessed Apple wor­ship­per, but I do accept that hav­ing to do this to make pho­tos look reas­on­able is a real pain. I should really get myself an HTC Desire iPhone 4 ;)