MacMost Now 432: iPhone Camera Apps

Take a look at five camera apps for the iPhone 4 that help you take better pictures and apply special effects and other elements when you are done. Learn how to two panoramas, time delay shots and time lapse.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode, let's look at some handy camera apps for the iPhone. This episode of MacMost Now is brought to you by Gazelle. Gazelle is the easiest, fastest way for you to sell, or recycle your gadgets. Every item gets an offer, and you get paid to be environmentally responsible. Use promo code MacMost2 for a 5% bonus. So the iPhone 4 has a fantastic camera. This completely replaced everything but my highest-end digital camera. But with a great camera, you probably want some great photo apps. So here's a look at 5 photo-apps that I find worth-having. Let's start by taking a look at camera-plus, which is a general photo-taking application with some extra features. You can click here to go to the camera, and since I've got nothing behind the camera right. Now, flip it to show the front there, and we can then look at some of the extra features like being able to turn the flash on and off and shut it, before that's only on the rear-facing camera. You can flip things around, you can zoom it, you can activate a stabilizer function, and of course you can take a picture. Once you've done that, you can go to the light-box, which is the other side of this application, and you can edit a photo that you've taken, adding a variety of different features to it: changing its exposure and what the picture looks like, you can crop it, apply a few effects to it, and some borders as well, or save out the photo to your regular camera, or you can also quickly share using a variety of different services. You can also grab a photo that you've got from your library, and then bring that in and use those same editing effects on those. One of the best features of camera plus is you can touch your screen with two fingers. One finger will represent where the focus should be, and the other one will represent the exposure, so you can separate those two to get perfect shots. Another app like that is called Photogene, and in that you can basically take a new photo or bring in a photo just like with Cameraplus, and then you can do various things with the photo, there are a variety of effects here you can crop and rotate the photo, either by a little bit or by a good amount, and then you can apply various filter effects, and give an amount for those. You can also adjust the colors here, and you have a ton of control here over the light levels, being able to adjust the exposure, that kind of thing. You can add shapes and symbols. When you're done with these, save them out back to your camera roll or do a variety of different share functions with them, even copy them to the clipboard. Now here are two different panoramic type of applications, one called autostich. This is a great way to create a panoramic with the pictures you have taken. So you take a set of pictures, so for instance let's grab some from the camera roll here that forms a panorama, you can see these three right here are three consecutive shots along the same scene. Bring those in and I'll tap "stitch" and it will work automatically and you don't have to tweak anything manually, and bring in all of those - create one panoramic image. Just like that! You can crop it, make it rectangular, and then do various things with it. Now, here's an alternative type of panorama: You Gotta See This" You basically wave the camera around at a scene and it basically takes a whole bunch of different photos, and then you can do a variety of things with them, mostly just putting them overlaid on top of each other - it doesn't create a seamless panorama, but it does create something really quick - you don't have to do any extra work, so no extra steps, and you can quickly send out an image. So its great for taking in a very large image and just sending it to somebody, or just remembering it very quickly without having to take multiple pictures. So here's a great free app called Gorillacam that takes - does a variety of different things. One of the things it does is it allows you to take a time-lapse, so you can set it up to take, say a certain number of shots spaced, very closely together like 5 seconds, or you could say, I want it to take a shot every two minutes, and I want you to take a thousand of them, and then set your maybe older iPhone or current iPhone up in a corner of a room and take a bunch of different shots. You can also create a self-timer here that will take a shot after a preset amount of time, like take it after 10 seconds, which is very useful. I'll put links to all of these apps up at this post at MacMost.com, so check them out. Until then this is Gary Rosensweig with MacMost Now.

Camera apps mentioned in this post:

Gorillacam