This week in my App Smart column, I wrote about some of the smartphone apps that have brought powerful photo manipulation techniques to your pocket. This is the kind of image trickery that used to be possible only on a desktop computer running Photoshop.
Many of these photo manipulation apps offer a range of effects, and you can “layer†effects on top of each other. But there are many simpler apps that can quickly transform basic smartphone photos into better images, or photos with an arty angle.
An example is Elasticam, a $2 iOS app that lets you tweak and twist your photos as if they were on a sheet of plastic. This can produce some entertaining funhouse mirror effects. The app's easy controls can be used to pull a photo of someone's face toward the nose, or add a crazy swirling spiral to someone's ears, for example. Delicate touches can also make your legs look a little slimmer.
Facebox, for Android, is similar - although I did manage to crash it while testing it.
Percolator ($2 for iOS) turns your photos into a pile of colored bubbles. Close up, the altered image looks like one of those cards your optometrist uses to test for color-blindness, but from a bit farther away it looks like an arty representation of the original photo. You can adjust many settings to get the effect you want from this delightfully quirky app, which calls the process of adjusting your image “grinding†it up. It's more for entertainment than serious photo editing.
Dash of Color is a surprisingly powerful app that can add dramatic effect to a photo. First, it turns your color image into black and white. Then you then carefully dab at the screen to restore color to parts of the image. It's free for Android and iOS.
Apps like these turn otherwise ordinary smartphone snaps into something you may like to share with your friends over Facebook or even print out and hang on your wall. Some of them also perform some standard photo editing, like removing red-eye from photos. Others have some brain-twisting effects like changing your eye color (the free iOS app Magic Eye Color Effect).
Quick Call
TV Guide has given its free Android app a big overhaul. The app has a New Tonight, Trending feature so you can see what other people are watching, and it has more social networking so you can share your TV choices with the world.
