Instagram is a giant non-stop party. Everyone’s putting in effort to project the best possible version of themselves. If pre-gaming is critical to a perfect soirée, editing photos before sharing it with the world is key to raking in those all-important likes and comments.
There are plenty of apps around for mobile photo editing, like Photoshop Express, VSCO Cam, and Afterlight. The new kid on the block planning to shake up things is Truefilm. Developer Martin Lee has thrust together some of the best aspects of competing apps and even goes deeper with some of the more typical tools you’ll find in these apps. But even still, Truefilm is disappointingly light on some of its bonus features and new things it can do.
It’s should meet the needs of most mobile photographers, with an effective, considered range of filters that hit a sweet spot between quantity and quality. The key controls one might expect from an editor are present and correct, with fine-tuning options for things like contrast, saturation, brightness, grain control, cropping, rotation, and so on.
Truefilm, however, delves below the surface of many of these features, offering a greater array of tweaks than many competitors. Instead of a basic slider, those looking to adjust shadows, midtones, and highlights can tinker with red, green, and blue sliders until they optimize those aspects.
The editing suite has a few extra touches, like frames, face retouching, and text overlays. Face retouching comes in two features, smoothing and patching from another area of the image, both of which work well but are limited in function. Truefilm has just one font for text overlays, though you can toy with the color, opacity, and size of the text. But since these are features that augment the main editing flow, they’re less significant than, say, had the contrast slider proven iffy.
Perhaps the most welcome function is the history view. Where some editing apps force you to undo (or redo) each change to restore previous versions of your edit, or allow you to compare the most recent version with only the original image, Truefilm uses a stack of images, where each version of your edit is saved for you to flick through in a 3D display. It’s a smart, handy way to manage changes during the edit flow.
Truefilm is a greatest hits of editing apps that’ll cover most needs, and is a good value at 99 cents. The face retouching and text options don’t quite come up to scratch, especially compared to some of the more detailed apps that do such things.
Truefilm is an iOS app that can be downloaded for $0.99 in the iTunes App Store.