Photoshop Express

Photoshop Express is a very simple photo editing application for the iPhone. The best thing about this application is that it is free, unlike many of the other photo applications we tested.

There are five buttons along the button of the application: Adobe, Edit, Online, Upload and Settings. Adobe is simply sample photos and links to more effects, tips, etc... The edit tab is what you will probably use most. On the edit tab (see photo right), you can crop, adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, contrast or make the photo black & white. The next button over is used to give the photo effects such as sketch, soft focus or sharpen. The final button on the top row (the stars) allows you to add more effects, such as vibrant, pop, vignette blur, etc... and borders.

Those are your only options, but that should be enough for journalistic uses. The bottom buttons let you cancel, redo/undo and save. Under the save menu, as you can see in the image, you can save and exit, upload (Photoshop.com), post to Facebook or TwitPic.

This application is geared for quick edits to photos. To edit a photo, click a type of edit that you want to make, such as Saturation. It will give you a tip (unless you turn them off) on how to best use this edit. For instance, the tip on how to change the saturation says "slowly slide your finger left/right over the image to adjust the saturation level." All you have to do is pinch or push like you would to zoom in/out and the levels will change.

I would definitely recommend this application. It is easy, powerful and free.

Photogene

Photogene is easily my favorite photo editing application on the iPhone. It is very simple, yet effective. It does everything that you would want to do to edit your photos in a journalistic function and then some.

The buttons on the side are fairly self-explanatory, but I will briefly go over them. The scissors button is for cropping - simply drag the size of the box you would like and hit crop. The two arrows in the form of a box is for rotating the image. The filter button is the one that looks like an oil filter. This is for more drastic effects such as sharpen, pencil, blur, black & white, posterize, sepia, nightvision and heatmap. You can adjust the strength of each of these filters or reset to the original photo. The color wheel button allows you a great deal of control when it comes to color adjusting. You can change the levels (auto levels works wonderfully), the exposure, the colors and the red-green-blue balance of the photo.

The next two buttons are something that you will most likely not use for journalistic function - the star button allows you to add shapes such as a speech bubble and the square allows you to add a border or frame.

If you make a mistake, click on the back or redo arrows, which are the next buttons down. The final button is used to save your edits. You can change the resolution of the photo (200, 320, 640, 800, 1024, 1600, 2048 and 2592 for high resolution images). You can also preserve geotags, and share your image in a variety of ways such as email, FTP, flickr and Facebook.

Photogene is only $1.99 and I would highly recommend it!

If you don't take my word, take the word of Glyn Evans, the founder of iPhonegraphy. His website, http://www.iphoneography.com/ features all photos shot on mobile devices. This is his opinion of Photogene:

Photogene is like having a desktop photo editor in your pocket, giving you the ability to truly edit your photos on the go, letting you crop, sharpen, straighten, rotate and add frames to your photos, as well as manually or automatically adjust histogram levels, gamma correction, RGB balance, the colour temperature and saturation.

Photo Application Week!

With Halloween quickly approaching, we decided to make this photo app review week! Stay tuned for reviews on Adobe Photoshop Express, CameraBag, Pano, PhotoGene, Camera+ and Hipstamatic.

Editing Applications Wrap-Up

Need to know which audio and video applications to purchase on your iPhone. We have the tips tricks and opinions you need all summarized below. Here is a wrap-up of the editing applications we have done so far.

Video editing applications

• ReelDirector by Nexvio Inc.
• 1st Video by VeriCorder Technology, Inc.
• iMovie by Apple Inc.
• iTimelapse Pro by Laan Consulting Corp
• Showcase by VeriCorder Technology, Inc.

Audio editing applications

• VC Audio Pro by VeriCorder Technology, Inc.
• Monle by Ochen K

Non-editing audio applications

• AudioBoo by Best Before Media Ltd.
• Blue FiRe by Blue Microphones
• AudioNote Lite

More VeriCorder Technology: Showcase & VC Audio

In the beginning of this project when I was experimenting with different audio and video applications, I thought that VeriCorder was going to be my least favorite of them all. They look technically heavy with all kind of editing features that you can do. These applications really do have everything that you find on a computer, which, frankly, scared me. I didn't want to have to do all of the fine tweaking I do on a computer on such a little screen. That being said… VeriCorder products are now my favorite applications. While other applications such as ReelDirector may offer audio slideshows, these apps are not as advanced as VeriCorder. I am by no means trying to sound like a commercial for VeriCorder products, but I have definitely had the best luck with them.

VC Audio is audio editing application from the Canadian-based company. Like all of VeriCorder's products, you can buy a Consumer edition for a price, in this case $5.99, or you if you set up a paid MIMS subscription, you can get the Networks version for free upon setup. Our school has an account with VeriCorder, so we used the Networks version. From the home page, you can manage your settings by clicking on the wheel/cog in the upper right corner. There you can turn airplane mode on and off. This allows for better recording and disables the phone features of your device. You can also manage integration settings such as SoundCloud, email as ringtone and email as M4A (AAC).

If you go back to the home screen, you can click on either the folder (where you will find audio clips and projects, or you can click on the mic to record. You MUST record in VC Audio to have the audio to edit in the program. This wasn't obvious to me and I recorded a few things in Voice Memos hoping to move it over later, only to find that wasn't an option. If you didn't record in the application, there is one bit of hope. If you can email the sound clip to yourself and get it on your iTunes, then you can import from iTunes on VC Audio.

In the editing mode, you can insert a clip by pressing the plus sign. and select a clip. You can listen to the clip, double click it and drag the sliders to where you want the clip to start and stop. Then drag your selection down onto one of the boxes below the waveform. When you are done, push the check mark. There are a lot of more advanced features on this screen. In order from left to right, you can play, zoom, undo/redo, go back to the beginning of the clip, remove the last selection you made, trash, crop, add another clip, export, close and save.

iMovie

I’ve used iMovie multiple times for various videos and I’ve found that it works best as a tool to put together clips in a string, and that’s about it. I am a big fan of the application, it’s easy to use, doesn’t glitch, and exports quickly to your Camera Roll. It’s incredibly easy to get off of your iPhone when linked to your computer and simple enough to upload to whichever video site you want.

The issue is you can’t do voiceovers like a conventional news story because there’s no multitrack editing. You would need to time your clips and voiceover separately, which would really defeat the purpose of mobile journalism. So if you are doing breaking news and film a standup of yourself at the site and then edit different b-roll with an interview clip, that would be your story. No voiceovers, trust me. You can’t actually control the volume of the sound, which can get unfortunate if your video was taken from too far away and without a stick mic.

Update: 10.10.10

Here is one of my loosely edited videos for One Day on Earth. I also updated several photos and some raw video footage from October 10, 2010. You can check out my account here: http://www.onedayonearth.org/profile/JenniferElston or on my Vimeo account.

Boring, Yet Beautiful Mid-Missouri from Jennifer Elston on Vimeo This is my video for One Day on Earth to help document the world's story on October 10, 2010 (10.10.10). I pictured all of the clips going along to Sufjan Stevens' song 'Chicago.'

It is loosely edited so in the off chance that One Day on Earth actually uses my footage, they can pull from longer clips because in the disclaimer, it states that they probably won't keep your edited piece together. I really didn't have anything of interest happening to me on 10.10.10. I was just out enjoying the nice fall weather, etc... A lot of the other submissions show poverty, starvation, birth and death. My piece seems so insignificant when discussing those issues.

Monle

I really think that Monle is the best editing application for mobile journalism, if only because of its multitrack editing format. If you’re used to editing in multitrack, you’re going to be incredibly frustrating with some of the other audio editing applications. Monle does allow you to fade clips in and out of each other.

You can overlap clips and control the volume of each individual clip. It works well if you’re planning on doing a voiceover for a slideshow, radio piece, or podcast it would be perfect, but you can’t use too many audio bites or the application glitches. Also, the clips can’t be too long or the application doesn’t handle them well. Basically, keep it short and simple.

You can’t add audio from other programs stored elsewhere on your iPhone, so if you decide to go with this application be sure to record in Monle. You can’t bring in exterior songs from iTunes either.

Review: 1stVideo

So, I've pretty much just been working with the 1st video application in one way or another so far, and I have to say, it's a surprising app that takes a little getting used to.

Now, at first, it seemed like an incredibly time consuming process. I assumed I would need to go clip by clip and trim them all before I could drop them into a timeline. This was my fault for not understanding how the application works. I'm sure it probably saved me a little time in the REAL editing phase, but it doubled my clips and took about an hour before I even so a timeline, at which point I commenced to cut and clip things without regard for my earlier trimming. Once you start a new project, though, this baby shines.

The video editing section of 1st Video just WORKS. My fingers are a little big, so sometimes it got frustrating trying to snag the indicator, but once I got the hang of it I was zooming. Plus, the feature where you can tap the screen with two fingers to enter into a menu of abilities, chief among these being copy, paste and cut was a godsend. It was intuitive, worked where I needed it to, and didn't bite back too many times. I say too many times because I found myself cursing after five minutes of getting exactly the right selection, only to skip the drag and drop stop and insert the entire clip into my timeline. Aligning sound was also a cinch, although something weird was going on with my leveling. Still, I took to it with the attitude that, if I repeated my command enough times, the program would eventually become agreeable. A little tyrannical, maybe, but overall effective.

Fire Factor 2010

Today we made our first attempt at writing a feature, complete with voice-over for our coverage of Mizzou's Annual Fire Factor. We might have aimed a little too high. First of all, the video editing applications are not all up to par. Neither ReelDirector or iMovie have multi-track editing, and thus, we had to just import the voiceover from our iTunes accounts. There is no way to adjust the sound on the audio or readjust the timing. For more on ReelDirector, click here. Secondly, some of the video editing tools didn't work as seamlessly as we would have hoped. Some of the applications closed on us. **Correction - this event was the tenth annual, not the ninth as stated in the clip.

Here are our videos -

Using ReelDirector, a stick mic with an XLR adapter from VeriCorder and a mini tripod: (Jennifer Elston)

Fire Factor 2010 from Jennifer Elston on Vimeo.

(September 29, 2010) Mizzou's annual fire safety event.

Using iMovie and a mini Mic from VeriCorder: (Amanda Heisey)

Fire Factor 2010 from Amanda Heisey on Vimeo.

Using 1st Video, a Gorillapod and Blue Mikey: (Drew Dumas)

Here are some photos taken during the event. All of the photos were edited with the iPhone Photogene application.