Photogene. A Respectable Photo Editor for iPad.

With the iPad having such a large screen, it turns out it becomes perfect for photo editing on the move. But like everything, the screen is only as good as the software running beneath it. At the US launch of the iPad, I was surprised at the sheer lack of photo editing suites available for the new device. Luckily, Photogene made the cut for day 1.

I have to say — I like Photogene. Ever since I bought it for my iPhone a few months ago, it became my number one tool for photo editing tasks on the move, performing menial simple actions such as rotating a landscape shot I’d taken with the camera, to portrait (and visa versa). So, how does Photogene fair on the iPad? Well, pretty well. The first thing you’ll probably notice is the UI is practically the same, apart from some minor adjustments.

Opening the app you’ll see two toolbars. One located towards the top of the screen, and the other towards the bottom. Lets start with the bottom. This toolbar features 8 core editing features.

From left to right those features include:

Crop
Say you’re on the move and need to lose some excess off that photo you just shot, with Photogene’s crop facility the app will allow you to crop to a few different ratios including: 1:1, 2:3, 3:2, 3:4, 4:3 and finally 16:9. If none of these suit, you can also drag a custom crop selection out by grabbing any one of the four outer corner handles. The app will display in real time the crop ratio you are creating.

Rotate
Tapping this button will give you a few different options on how you might wish to change the rotation of your photo. The app allows you to rotate either left, right, flip the photo vertically, or flip the photo horizontally. If you need to straighten an image, you can also do that from this pane by sliding the ‘Straighten’ slider. Photogene will overlay your photo with a 3 x 3 grid, allowing you to line up your photo with the horizon, perfectly.

Macros
The macros menu is were Photogene becomes a little more interesting. Here, from a sliding side panel, you can choose from a range of different effects to apply to your photos. There are 15 effects in total. These include: Bleach, Web, Noir, Reflect, 20’s Vintage, 40’s Vintage, 70’s Vintage, Cinema, Psychodelica, Vivid, Grayscale, Square, Stamp and Simple Frame. Each effect is different in its own right, and all effects during testing seem to be of high quality.

Filters
As with the Macros tab, the Filters tab also provides a sliding side panel and this time showcasing the app’s 8 different editing filters. These include: Sharpen, Pencil, Edge Blur, Black and White, Posterize, Sepia, Nightvision and Heatmap. I have to admit, this part of the app felt it could have offered more. While the filters offers are great in quality themselves, I’d like to see filters like ‘Plastic Wrap’, ‘Brushes Strokes’ and ‘Distort’ functionality found in Adobe’s Photoshop, possibly come to Photogene in the future.

Color Adjust
This tab is just as it sounds. Again set out on a sliding panel, Photogene provides the necessary setting to edit your photo’s colour profiles, in detail. These settings include the ability to change your photo’s Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Saturation, Color temperature and levels. The app also gives you access to RGB scales via a collapsible hidden menu. These setting allow you to edit the levels of red, green and blue within your photo.

Curves
If you want to take editing your photo’s levels one step further, Photogene offers the ability to edit ‘Curves’. This is basically a quick and easy way of adding new black and white points to your photo, allowing you to dynamically change all the settings available in the Color Adjust tab, in one move.

Symbols
Pretty straight forward, this tab offers up various different block filled shapes you can add to your creation. There are 13 shapes offered in total, and these include: a rounded speech bubble, a sharp speech bubble, a jagged speech bubble, a square speech bubble, a thought bubble, an oval, a rounded rectangle, a five-pointed star, a squared rectangle, an octagon, a heart, an arrow and finally a pen-like inked ring. Each of these shapes can be added to your photo simply by tapping and dragging them into your canvas. Once places you ‘ll have the option to re-size each object, or if you wish to delete an object, simply hit the ‘X’ associated with the item in the top left.

Frames
The last tab on the bottom toolbar is the frames tab. This tab features a few effects which could finish off your photo nicely. All of high quality, the app offers up 13 frames to choose from, including: a rounded boarder, edge fade, edge highlight, stamp, film strip horizontally, film strip vertically, taped corners, white frame large, white frame small, drop shadow and finally notepad edges. Each frame can be changed in colour and you can choose to add an Apple-esque reflection to your photo(s), if required.

Anytime you wish to see your creation in full, without the app’s side sliding panels getting in your way, just tap on the canvas in front of you. Photogene’s edit panels will fly out of view immediately, allowing you to see your whole document with the ability to zoom in to around x5.

Across the top of the app are a few other features which should help you achieve the effect you’re looking for, and share it with the world. From left to right these include: Undo, Redo, Undo All (step by step), Import Photo, Share to Twitter, Facebook, Copy to Clipboard, E-Mail photo. The last button on the top menu allows you to choose in which resolution you wish to save your photo(s). By default 5 resolutions are offered, including: 200, 320, 640, 800 and 1024, with the ability to create a custom one with a tap.

If you happen to quit the app during your edit session, the good news is Photogene will restore that session, exactly where you left off, next time you open the app. Meaning you can edit something, and jump back to the homescreen without the worry of losing your progress.

Summing up, Photogene for iPad provides the basics of photo editing, and a little more. While the app does lack some of the professional editing features of some well know desktop editing suites, and the iPad version of the software barely differs from the iPhone version, the app provides its powerful editing functionality in a user intuitive and easy to use way. Photogene for iPad takes everything you loves from its smaller iPhone counterpart, and multiples it by x2 — All the while keeping it’s simplistic easy of use and user appeal.

We recommend this app for the amateur photographer as it provides all you’ll need, however for the more professional among you, you’re probably going to want to stick to your desktop editing software for those more ‘in-depth’ edit requirements.