Did you ever find yourself using the amazing Snapseed and thinking to yourself, “man, I love this app more than a man should love a piece of photo-editing software, but I sure wish it could do more. Like, what if it could save my edits as presets?”
Well, you lucky, app-loving deviant, you: your wish has been answered. No, not by Snapseed, which Google will surely kill off soon enough anyway, but by a brand new app called Photoristic.
The comparison with Snapseed is apt, as Photoristic uses the same swipe gestures to do its stuff: up and down to pick an adjustment, left and right to actually adjust the adjustment. The main difference is that Photoristic has a bunch more things that you can adjust.
In addition to the regular editing tools (brightness, exposure and so on) there’s a special B&W mode (including color filters), a split toner (pretty much every photo could use some cooling in the shadows), really in-depth color controls (you can tweak the hue and saturation of eight different colors).
But the best part is the presets. The app comes loaded with a bunch, both color and B&W, and you can also save your own. This is the one thing I really want in Snapseed.
Unfortunately, the app isn’t quite there. First, it doesn’t have Snapseed’s amazing Drama filter (although there is a similar-looking preset called Drama). Second, there appears to be no way to crop or straighten an image.
And third, it feels jerky.
The up/down selection of the various editing tools is fine, but when you move left to right to apply them the little indicator up top (like Snapseed’s bottom indicator) is herky and jerky as all get out. It seems like the actual on-screen edits are happing just fine, but the indicator makes it feel awful.
It’s like eating crunchy food with your ears covered. The noise makes it seem way more crunchy, even though nothing has changed (unless someone swapped out your Snickers for a Dime while you were covering up your ears).
This is doubly bad as the app claims to be the “fastest photo editor for iPad,” and uses the GPU instead of the CPU to speed things up. I tried it on both the mini and on an iPad 3 and it was the same on both.
Still, I like the app quite a lot, and it’s stable, so I’ll keep on using it through the next few updates to see how it improves. And in the meantime, I’ll be sticking with Snapseed. Sure, it has no presets, but then again it’s so easy to use maybe it doesn’t need them.
Source: App Store
