Forum Review: iFXMagic for the iPhone

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iFXMagic Forum Review by cjvitek

Given the lack of iPhone tools for camera or picture editing (you don't even have some basic filters on the camera!), I saw this program and was pretty excited. It is advertised as a way to add filters to your pictures, including many filters that are commonly found on major software editing packages. So I decided to pick this up and take a look to see what it offered.

The program is easy to use. After you get by the splash screen, you can select a picture on your phone (either from the camera roll, or some other picture folder you have). When you choose a picture, you can choose one of four buttons at the buttom. The camera button allows you to take another picture. The save button allows you to save the modified picture. The book icon lets you choose another picture from your library. And the "FX" button allows you to apply an image effect.

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Simple, huh.

So I jumped right in, choose a picture (one of the spin art pictures my daughter made), and started to look at the filter.

Some of the filters are really cool, the kind you would expect to see in a graphics editing program: mosiac, cubism, cartoon, emboss, oilify, etc. But some of the filters were not simply static things you could do the the picture - they involved a changing image. Like the "matrix" filter changed you picture into the cascading green numbers from the matrix movie.

These "action" filters (as I called them) don't really make a lot of sense to me. You can't save them, so the only real purpose they serve is to allow you to look at them within the program. If you could save it as an animated gif or something, well, that would be cool. But saving it only saves the current 'snapshot' regardless of what the action scene is doing.

The actual image filters are nice, and you can save those. However, there were three problems with those. First, unless you apply a filter, save the picture, load the picture, then apply another filter, there is no way to combine multiple filters. Second, you couldn't change any of the settings on the filter. For example, the pixelize filter - you can't control the size of the pixels. There are no settings for anything. Lastly, some obvious filters (black and white, sepia) aren't included.

The filters they did include are nice, and can certainly make pictures more interesting, but it seemed to me that the problems listed above are a serious short coming in this program.

Just to note, a lot of people have complained about the program crashing. I haven't experienced that, but who knows.

Pros:

Nice filters to enhance or add creative flair to your pictures

Cons:

The motion filters don't seem to serve much of a purpose,
some basic filter options are missing.

Conclusion

All in all, for $2.99, this program can serve up some fun. But if they added a few more filters and options, you could really have a kick ass program on your hands.