Camera Awesome is a new all-singing, all-dancing photo app on the iOS Store this week. But just how awesome is it?
Brought to you by photo sharing site SmugMug, the first noticeable thing about this app is the price: it’s free. There are no adverts inside it, you’ll be pleased to hear. But there are quite a lot of extras that can only be unlocked with in-app purchases.
Camera Awesome wants to offer you everything. It’s a camera with various shooting modes, exposure and focus lock, post processing filters and transformations, social network sharing, geolocation support, you name it. Everything.
There are some nice features. Big Button mode turns the whole screen into a shutter button. In video mode, the app can start recording footage before you actually hit the record button. It can save smaller files to make sharing faster – and one-tap instant sharing will be useful if you love to snap and share on social networks as fast as possible.
There’s also a lovely info pane about every saved picture, showing you basic exif data like date, time, shutter speed, aperture, ISO and so on; as well as location on a map, and sharing status. Beautifully done.
But the central feature, the Awesomizer, isn’t quite as awesome as I expected. I found the results disappointing, and much less interesting than the nearest comparable feature in the nearest comparable third-party app: Clarity mode, in Tap Tap Tap‘s Camera+.
Camera Awesome also suffered from occasional sluggishness, with buttons and controls not always responding to taps first time. It’s worth noting too that only nine of the effects presets come with the free app. If you want more, you’ll have to buy them with in-app purchases.
There’s a lot on offer here, and for free you can’t go wrong, so I think it’s worth downloading Camera Awesome if you’re a keen photographer. But be prepared to encounter some limitations.
[xrr rating=40%]
