PicTricks – Review

Our rating:

By: PicTricks

Version #: 1.0

Date Released: 2009-01-15

Developer: KUANLOONG YONG

Price: 1.99

User Rating:

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This afternoon I wanted to play around a little bit with a picture that I took and send it to a friend of mine. It was a simple idea —  taking a picture of him and putting a silly uniform on him so that he  looked a little bit like Sgt. Pepper. So  I went in search of the right app. There were number of possibilitites and this was the first I tried…

This application looked rather interesting. It promised the possibility of taking the picture and adding fun elements to it. Unfortunately the reality of the application didn’t quite live up to the initial hype.

The application offers the possibility of grabbing a new picture or choosing one of from your photo album. Doing this, however, is a bit cumbersome. You first have to tap "original photo" if you want to change the photo Once again, this time "change". That brings up a selection window in which you can "take a photo", "choose from camera roll", or "choose from photo library". Three taps when, it would have been just as easy to have one screen that had all four options — original, take, camera roll or photo library available at one time. It’s not a huge issue but it’s one that made things a little bit cumbersome when first using the application.

From there you can begin to have fun with the the picture using its "Tricks".

The first option is to do an "instant makeover". Instant makeover takes the picture, detects the features, and immediately adds some fun to it. You have no control over what happens but the result is more than a bit humorous most of the time. There are five main categories that can be added — hairstyle, glasses, facial hair, hat, and Romance. In addition, while you can select each element (or none) you can also choose to have the application randomly apply one of the "add-ons". These work rather well and rendered some rather humorous results but, unfortunately, the overall choices were too limited. (Here’s example of using the stock picture that comes with the application.)

The second "trick" is "Magically Resize". This trick analyzes the picture to determine the least important parts of it and removes them when shrinking the image. It offers a number of different options. The first is the option to paint out parts of the picture. This allows your finger to act as an eracer or, when inverted, to paint the image back in. The second automatically analyzes the picture and reduces those elements of the picture that are least important thereby permitting you to shrink what you have. Why would you choose to do this? Quite simply — when you normally shrink a pic everything scales down the same way. That means that if there are towers in the picture and you narrow the image the towers become narrow as well. With this application, however, as you shrink the image the most important parts of it maintain their initial size — the image itself, however, get smaller. It’s easier to show the three options — the first picture is a normal size picture, the second picture is the magically resize the picture and the third is an example of what would happen if you shrink the picture without using this application. It’s actually a lot of fun and if you use the "paint out" method you have a good deal of control area.

The third option is "Chroma -Key". This is an attempt to do a blue screen image replacement using the iPhone by replacing the background of the picture with another one. It’s a great concept but unfortunately in my experience it didn’t work all that well. I suspect that if an image had a completely solid background (similar to blue screen or green screen used used on television) it would be a different story, but it’s rare to have such a completely solid background in the photo.

For me it just gave ugly distorted images. It could, however, be used to take a picture of someone on a solid background and then have fun ading in other backdrops.

Overall, this application is a terrific example of just how powerful the iPhone is as a handheld, mobile computing device. It’s ability to work with photographs is truly amazing but this app, while a good start, falls just a little bit too short. It’s a shame because the user interface is actually quite nice and what it does well is exceptionally well.

Quick Take

Value: Medium. High with some added options
Would I Buy Again: Not right now
Learning Curve: Medium
Who Is It For: Someone who wants to play around with images on their iPhone
What I Like: The aspects that work well work very well and remarkably quickly. Super stable and efficient.
What I Don’t: Needs more options with regard to adding hats, hair etc.

Final Statement: A good start with a lot of potential!