Filterstorm review

We review Filterstorm, an image manipulation app that tweaks your iPhone’s photos and provides a range of easy-access picture improvements

The iPhone has captured the world’s attention because of its huge range of incredible, technically amazing features, but Apple has always let itself down in terms of camera quality. Even when the iPhone 3GS improved matters with a bit of focusing, and the iPhone 4 tried to offer a flash, the camera can only be considered average at best.

It was inevitable image manipulation software would eventually come to the iPhone, and at first it was damn impressive to see “Photoshop-on-a-phone” apps tweaking colours, adjusting brightness levels and applying useless, but fun, embossing filters to your device’s camera roll.

There are a lot of these apps now, so the novelty has entirely worn off. This means apps like Filterstorm have to impress us in other ways, and while it’s got a great feature set to help it stand out, Filterstorm catches our photographic eye because of its sheer usability.

Photos can either be pulled in from your existing iPhone library, or captured directly within the Filterstorm app. From there a host of fairly typical, essential adjustments can be made to bring your photos up to digital camera quality. An interesting additional option is grabbing an image from the clipboard, which makes the app equally useful if you just snatched a picture from a webpage or email and want a way to crop it, clean it and save it.

All the usual suspects are here, such as cropping, rotating, scaling, brightness, contrast, blurring and saturation, along with some more unique filters such as a clone stamp, and the option to adjust the curves. A macro, of sorts, is also available as an “Automation,” which saves a series of editing procedures and allows you to repeat them with a single tap. Very useful if a range of photos all need the same tweaks.

Invisible information can also be added and edited, and saved as either IPTC or EXIF data within the image file. Again, this is particularly useful if you intend to send your images online, which can be achieved directly within Filterstorm. You can save your photos back into the iPhone memory, naturally, or they can be routed to an email attachment or, most interestingly, posted via FTP. You can save up to three FTP profiles making it easy to bump your pics to the safety of the Internet.

All of these great features would be nothing without the impressively simple user interface, however. Almost everything has been refined into a single button tap followed by a slider adjustment. Although this might sound overly simplistic, Filterstorm proves there’s very little in terms of photo manipulation that can’t be achieved with a slider bar, making the app immensely useable on the iPhone’s small screen.

If you’re interested in improving the iPhone’s inherently poor quality photos without faffing around on a computer, Filterstorm should be a priority.

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