Apple’s iMovie video editor hit the bigger screen, launching as a universal app alongside the iPad 2. 8mm Vintage Camera brought an old school aesthetic to one of the newest shooters on the planet.

GarageBand brought Apple’s multitrack music editor to iOS, complete with instruments. Djay let you mix tracks so realistically you’ll think you’re in an 80s breaking movie. DM1 – The Drum Machine turned your iPad into a vintage drum kit.

Yes, it’s odd jumbling all these apps together, but to keep the number of categories sane, we had to it. They all have two things in common, however — they’re all great and you have to pick your favorite. Vote up top and tell us why you voted they way you did in the comments! These are your awards, so get to it!

Every day, TiPb gets flooded with announcements for new and updated iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad apps and games. So every day we pick just a few of the most interesting, the most notable, and simply the most awesome to share with you!

• Sand Slides: Another app to add to your collection of addictive puzzle games! [Free - iTunes link]

• Photogene for iPad: Get 11 additional frames or GO-PRO mode (extra tools) via in-app purchase. [$2.99, with in-app purchases - iTunes link]

• 2Do: Tasks Done in Style: Update gives recurring tasks the option to have an end date and priority mapping with Toodledo has been revised. [$6.99 - iTunes link]

• myAT&T: Previously myWireless, myAT&T now supports both wireless and AT&T U-verse account management. [Free - iTunes link]

• Doodle Jump: This update brings a super-secret early Easter present! [Free - iTunes link]

Any other big apps or game releases or updates today? If you pick any of these up, let us know what you think!

Photogene is one of the top selling photography apps for iPhone and now we have that same great editing power, plus more, in Photogene for iPad [$3.99 - iTunes link].

Editing images with Photogene for iPad is pleasurable. The big screen allows you to really see the changes and the tools provided by Photogene are easy and intuitive to use.

• Enhance photos with multiple color adjustment: adjust color levels, exposure, contrast, saturation or manipulate the RGB.
• Apply filters such as the sharpen or the pencil filter.
• Crop, straighten and rotate your image.
• Add fun effects like text balloons, frames or special filters.

I have encountered a few minor bugs when using Photogene for iPad, but I trust that these will be fixed in a future update.

To see Photogene for iPad in action, follow us after the break!

Today’s TiPb Top 5 will be directed towards our iPhone and iPod Touch wielding readers who love photography. Just like our other TiPb’s top 5 must-have posts, all of these applications are available in the App Store. For the full overview, follow us after the break!

Photogene

Today’s first application is Omer Shoor’s photo editing app Photogene. If you’re looking to do some serious photo editing with your iPhone, Photogene is the app for you. Whether you want an app that auto edits for you and has special effects or you want full control over every aspect of the editing process, Photogene does it all!

• Correct color distribution, brightness, color temperature, exposure and contrast
• Gamma correction
• RGB Balance
• Special effects
• Customizable Frames and Frame effects
• Text bubbles

Photogene is available for $2.99. [iTunes link].

DSLR Camera Remote Professional Edition

Are you an aspiring or professional photographer with a Nikon or Canon DSLR? DSLR Camera Remote displays what your camera sees on your iPhone or iPod Touch and allows you to remotely control your camera’s shutter release and settings. This app is ideal for studio photography, self portraits, and awkward angles. Even though you are restricted to using this app on WiFi, when comparing it to the price of professional remotes, DSLR Camera Remote is a must-have for photographers with a supporting camera.

• Remotely fire your DSLR over any WiFi network (ad-hoc ok)
• See through your camera’s viewfinder with LiveView mode and focus remotely
• Remotely control camera settings like aperture, white-balance, and shutter-speed
• Auto Bracketing, burst, and intervalometer modes

DSLR Camera Remote Professional Edition is available for $19.99 [iTunes link]

Panorama

Next up, we have the excellent panoramic application Panorama. Similar applications require the user to have skill in aligning photos for the final stitching to look good, but not Panorama! The stitching algorithms built into Panorama are very sophisticated and do an amazing job at fixing a bad alignment job. So if you’re interested in taking beautiful, high quality panoramic shots, be sure to pick this one up!

• Sophisticated stitching algorithms
• Take individual photos as portrait or landscape
• Add photos to the left or right
• Auto brightness/exposure corrections

Panorama is available for $9.99 [iTunes link]

TiltShift Generator

Photographers will often shoot photos with a shallow depth of field to make their subject stand out, but the iPhone’s camera is rather limited in this regard. With TiltShift Generator, you can add a very natural blur to your photos to bring non-subject matter out of focus and adjust contrast and saturation to really make your photos pop. Look no further than TiltShift Generator to satisfy your depth of field generating needs.

• Create “retro miniature pictures”
• Radial or linear Blur
• Edit contrast and saturation
• Vignetting
• Direct email and Twitter support

TiltShift Generator is available for $0.99 [iTunes link]

ColorSplash

Have you ever wanted to add a Sin City feel to your photos with only specific details in color? With ColorSplash you can! This technique is what’s known as selective desaturation and with 4 different brush types and a mode to clearly see the boundaries between black & white and color, ColorSplashis an excellent choice to give your photos that dramatic look.

• Give photos a dramatic look by keeping chosen details in color
• Use your finger as brush
• 4 different brush types
• Share with Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter
• Alternate mode that shows colored regions in red to easily see boundaries between black & white and color.

ColorSplash is available for $1.99 [iTunes link]

Conclusion

There you have it, TiPb’s Top 5 Must-Have iPhone photo apps. Did we miss any of your favorites? Overlook any killer photo apps? Drop us a comment and let us know your list!

(Photogene Forum Review by cjvitek For more Forum Reviews, see the TiPb iPhone App Store Forum Review Index!)

Photogene is an iPhone “touch up” utlity that can be used to touch up or enhance photos you take with your iPhone.

First, what Photogene isn’t. It isn’t simply a series of filters that you can apply to photos. There are lots of apps out there that can apply a huge range of filters (oil painting, cartoon, black and white, sepia, posterize, etc). I have reviewed a couple of them. This app does have a few filters, but it is more about touching up photos (fine-tuning them, if you will) rather than simply applying a filter to make it “art”.

When you start the app, you can choose to take a new photo, edit an existing phot, or continue a previous session. This last option is particularly nice, it means the app “remembers” where you were and what you were doing. If you get interrupted, you don’t need to start over. One cool little thing is when you start the app, a “tip of the week” appears about taking photos with the iPhone. Normally I don’t like tips that appear like this, but I like it here because the tip is specific to using the iPhone camera (not just a general photography tip).

I was using a general photo of some mosquito cages when testing this app. The touch up features include a crop option, rotate option, three filters, color adjust, symbols, and frames. When you finish with your editing, you can save the photo or start over (take a new photo or edit a new photo). There is an undo button to undo the last edit, but there isn’t a complete “reset” button to undo all adjustments. I would like to see that in a future release. So let’s talk about the touch up features.

With the crop feature, you can choose to crop it with a specific ratio (3:4, 9:16, etc). The area that will be cropped appears highlighted on the picture, and you can resize it or move it around. One nice thing is that as your resizing the crop, you can see the pixel size that the new image will be – very useful. You can’t do a free-form crop however.

The rotate allows you to rotate the picture by 90% or flip the picture on an axis. If your image is at an angle, you can also do some slight angle adjustments to make it level.

The app comes with three filters – sharpen, pencil, and effect (which includes sepia, night vision, or infrared (heat vision). With sharpen and pencil, you can adjust the level of effect as well. Pencil is sort of cool, making your picture look like a pencil drawing. But as I said, this app isn’t about having 30 filters – it is mostly about touching up photos to make them as nice as possible.

Next we move onto color adjustment. Here, you can see the color histogram and either adjust it manually or automatically for the best color image. You can also adjust the exposure, contrast, saturation, color temperature, as the actual RGB levels. These are, in my opinion, the best features of this app because this is the area that really helps you touch up a picture to optimal quality.

You can add symbols like stars, word ballons (with text), arrows – about 13 symbols in all. These aren’t anything really that help the picture, but they can make a picture a little more entertaining.

Lastly, you can add a frame – ranging from a “blurred” frame that doesn’t have a distinct edge to more tradition picture frames to a stamp border or photo album “taped on the corners” frame. There are about 15 frames in all to choose from.

Working on a couple sample pictures, I was able to make some nice adjustments and really make some of the pictures shine. You are still working within the limitation of the iPhone camera, so pictures that are outdoors or in bright light are going to be the best, but you can really enhance some pictures that you might have throught were lost. The features like frames and symbols aren’t really that necessary, and I would have preferred more filters instead of having those, but they can be fun to add to some pictures.

Pros:

• Touch up iPhone pictures to make them shine

Cons:

• Some features don’t really add anything,
• no ability to completely reset a picture

All in all, this is a good, all around photo touch up tool for the iPhone. Rather than just rely on applying filters, you can make some manual adjustments to thingsl ike saturation and exposure to try to bring out the best in your pictures. Some of the effects don’t really add anything to the picture quality, but they might be fun to include in some pictures. There is no way to remove all the touchups at one, however – you have to reset each feature individually. But the color adjust can really make a picture shine. The app is $2.99, so the price is great if you use the iPhone camera a lot. Four and a half out of five stars.

TiPb Forum Review Rating

[http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=309327900&mt=8">Photogene is available for $2.99 via the iTunes App Store]