But, that isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of horrendous mishaps in the land of hair. I’ve had plenty of haircuts where I leave the salon on the verge of tears. I even know of one friend who came home, only to have her husband stare and say, with abject amusement, that had she a pilfered AK-47, she could pass as a terrorist. Ouch. Hair is serious business, people. It is the life force of many a woman, and much like our collection of shoes for every occasion, we want our hair to be bright and flattering, a direct reflection of ourselves. We scour magazines, peruse celebrity galleries online, and read articles about face shape and hair, all in the drastic, whole nine yards attempt to find that one perfect hairstyle, like Jennifer Aniston’s “the Rachel” of the 90s. Great hairstyles come but once a decade, it seems.

Hair Makeover by Touch Apps is a lot like those online hairstyle makeover sites where you plug in a picture of yourself, and bombard said picture with dozens of stock hairstyle photos that always look misaligned and disproportional to your face. Usually, these sites do nothing to help in your selection – the hair image always look plastic and unflattering when against your actual photo, and all too often you leave the site still feeling completely helpless, perhaps with even more doubt and frustration, about your hair. Hair Makeover, however, manages to be more presentable, and actually aids a bit in the uphill battle toward finding hair nirvana. You may take a picture of yourself or use one from your library, and then plug in a hairstyle of the short, medium or long length (or “men’s” hair if you’re feeling particularly androgynous), scrolling through each, and examining the results. You can save any results you like, to potentially use as a visual aid, and you can even email the results or pose them on facebook (why you would do this, I have no idea). I was pleasantly surprised at how the hairstyles actually looked semi-believable on my face – I’ll even go a step further and say it helped me a bit in figuring out what cuts would look good on me. Longer hair suits me – it’s youthful and playful, and endlessly flattering – but for awhile now I’ve been meaning to just chop it all off, experiment with that hair milestone every working woman in her mid-20s starts to take – that of the short, polished, professional bob, the one that says “Hi, I’m the project manager for Antiques United,” or, if it’s the absolute wrong cut, “Hi, I’m prematurely old.”

Haircuts are monumental decisions for a woman, if you decide to teeter on the dangerous side and try something completely different, telling your hairdresser to just, “go wild.” I actually just had my hair styled before Christmas, at a lovely salon in downtown Petaluma called Muse Salon, where this awesome chick named Eva discussed sci-fi flicks and nerds, clothing apps, and nightlife adventures while she snipped and blowdried my tresses. Now, let me tell you, I don’t get my hair cut that often. I like it wild and unfettered and I tend to go an entire year in between cuts – au natural suits me. After experimenting with wild dye jobs and blow-drying my hair to a death frizz in high school, every year since then I’ve enjoyed my natural hair color and air-drying, with coconut oil and leave-in conditioners. People remark on the healthiness of my hair, and well, that’s what happens when you do absolutely nothing to it. But, for the end of 2009, and for the brink of a new decade, I wanted a change of pace. I told my hairdresser those bold words, with smile emblazoned on my face, to just “go for it.” Before I entreat you to a story of pixie cuts and platinum locks, let me thankfully tell you how wise my hairdresser was. She thought about my skin color, my face shape, and my general style – judging from my wardrobe and demeanor – and created a hairstyle from that. In other words, I lucked out, because “go for it” to her, still took into consideration my overall package. Hair Makeover is a bit like that – you can wing it and try a bold style, but at least on this app, that picture of you with straight bangs and copper hair is but a mere facsimile, and you definitely do not have to commit to it.

My end result at Muse was dyed chocolate brown hair with an interesting choppy long-layered cut, which suited me just fine – it was, and is, beautiful and right up my alley. It was enough of a change for my friends to take notice, ooh and ahh, but close enough to my style that it melded seamlessly into my life. After using Hair Makeover, though, I definitely will have more courage when it comes to treading on unchartered territory: those unknown lands of blonde hair, curled and sprayed, spiky short, and chin-length bobs. The technology definitely has a ways to go before hair predictions will look perfectly realistic, but it’s always fun to try something new, right? Hopefully, Hair Makeover will help you make the baby steps.

FEATURES
* Over 200 Hairstyles.
* 14 Languages supported.
* Both Women & men hairstyles available.
* Great Variety of high quality hairstyles.
* Adjust your photo easily and fully to suit hairstyle.
* Pick photo from library or take new with camera
* Hairstyle will suit any background.
* Save the makeover photo and share with your friends.
* Upload to facebook with a single click.
* Use saved makeover photo to consult your hairdresser or friends to determine which hairstyle suits you the most.
* Easy And Fast switching between hairstyles.
* Up to date hairstyles.

The Initial Drawing

I’ve begun by taking a photo of a doodle of mine. Two years ago, this would have lost itself in one of my notebooks, but today I’m bringing it to a new level where it can be lost in the blogosphere and digital art cloud. Okay, so the photo is nothing to brag about. In fact, it’s quite embarrassing how poorly lit this is (which can easily to be case when the photo is taken under a blue umbrella on a sunny day.

Phase 2

I didn’t shy away from this lighting issue as I can easily manipulate exposure and saturation in PS Mobile (free) and save .jpg of each saved version to be layered in SketchBook ($2.99 – note that the linked review is before a recent update. Now .psd files may be exported!).

These two images have been manipulated in PS Mobile.

The blue image has had the saturation and exposure adjusted. The red image has had been tinted, then the exposure was adjusted, tinted again, and increased saturation.

I’ve found that working digitally like this, I am more willing to take risks as a) I export images so often that it’s embarrassing, b) I can infinitely undo/redo, and c) there are so many options in how to manipulate the imagery that I’d rather have too many versions than not enough.

Phase 3

I have imported the above images as layers in SketchBook. I placed the blue layer atop the red because I knew that there would be less red in the final product than blue.

The next step was fairly tedious as I erased the blue image everywhere I wanted the red to show, a process I will call “erasing in” the red. I chose not to just draw with a red brush because my black lines and values were consistent between the red and blue layers. This saved me some time and allowed for slight variation in the final image and carried nice feathered lines between the red and blue.

I then exported a .jpg as well as used the export flattened layers option. This exported a .png, but as I prefer .jpg for this exercise, I disregarded my export.*see how this may have been detrimental to my final product below!

Note: This process can be a little bit of a battery drainer depending upon your screen brightness. When you don’t need to know the true colors (as I didn’t when I was in the process of “erasing in” the red) I suggest lowering your brightness to both ease your eyes and the battery life.

After I was happy with the red, the image called for some highlights. I merged the layers and repeated my process only because there was no layer underneath, the output would be white. By altering the brush properties for the eraser, I was able to achieve an airbrush effect. I had two options here, as I could have either chosen to use an airbrush of white, or “erase in” the white. I chose the eraser method as I wanted to leave my options open to put another image or color where my highlights were being inserted.

EGAD!

Problem #1: Phone Call

I received a phone call from a friend who considers me his eternal Phone-a-friend since I’m the guy with the iPhone, which I humor because frankly I like showing off my rapid research abilities. Anyways, when returning to SketchBook, the app reloads and places you back where you were last working, except that the undo feature no longer works! This is the first problem I’ve encountered with my epic experimentation: Now I’m stuck with the experiments that I’m so sold on.

Luckily I save often. So I import the last .jpg I exported and can get back to work.

EGAD DEUX!

Problem #2: SketchBook Layer Order

So it appears that Sketchbook needs one more update because I cannot reorder the layers to my image. Now the option to replace some of those highlights with underlying photos is long gone.

I’ll refrain from shedding a tear as I wouldn’t want to wet my keyboard and create Problem #3.

Phase 4

I cut my losses and took the last exported image into iRetouch ($1.99 – often with 50% off sales) for some final effects.

First off, I used the Basic editor to crop the white bars from my image (Why SketchBook?! Why would you put bars on my image?!). I found that Sketchbook’s .jpg also created heavy loss of quality, so I went back into Sketchbook to export my flattened image as a .png. Again I cut my losses… I’d rather have a better resolution image that I like, than a horrible resolution image that I love.

The basic editor is only available in the paid version of iRetouch. As I only really used this to crop, I could have gotten away with cropping in PS Mobile and using iRetouch Lite (free). I will be going back to iRetouch’s Basic editor at the end though, where you will see my final lighting show.

After cropping, I used iRetouch’s Touchup tools to add in color and abstraction.

First thing you do in Touchup tools is go to settings and change your canvas size to the largest option, hit done. Go to Photo (lower right side of main screen) and re-open your image. If you forget this step, you will end up working on a low resolution image, which for me is more often than not synonymous for me with wasting time.

Now I can begin my work. Touchup tools allows for color touchups (along with a variety of other options which you can find in the previous review of iRetouch). I prefer using the XOR blend setting with a low opacity because it recolors the artwork and brings a geometric element in as well. The XOR setting can be found by tapping the button at the bottom right to access settings. Tap Blend Mode and drag your finger up on the screen to find XOR at the bottom of the blend settings.

I colored to my heart’s content.

Final Step

I saved the image (actually I did that a lot… but I wouldn’t subject you to twenty “Saved Again!” (yes I’m quite emphatic about saving). iRetouch Basic tools is great for Brightness and Contrast alterations to the entire image as you can preview the combination without committing yourself to the action. You can Brighten in iRetouch’s Touchup Tools, but it isn’t nearly as user friendly. I darkened the image and increased the contrast.

After this I saved and brought the image back into Touchup tools (yes again with the reopened image at a higher resolution… unless you’ve given up, which is ok. I won’t judge you.) and proceeded to lighten specific parts for dramatic effect.

Here’s the final image:

I hope you’ve learned something, enjoyed my art, or at least procrastinated something really worth procrastinating.

—-

For more iPhone app reviews search Appstruck for unbiased and opinionated reviews.

For more of David’s art you can visit his non-linear creativity blog The Big Ydea.

I’m shameful to admit my breakfast is usually nothing – every now and then I have tea or coffee, maybe a piece of fruit – but today I made a smoothie, bursting with blueberries, raspberries, coconut water, almond butter, and some greens powder to give it a nutritional kick. All I had to do was toss some ingredients in a blender and I had a well-rounded, nutritional breakfast. It took less time than to brew coffee or tea and in terms of being an actual food, it far surpassed the others.

Much like Occum’s Razor states that the simplest solution is often the right one, the simplest foods are often the tastiest, and sometimes, the simplest apps are the most entertaining. Framed! is an extraordinarily simple iPhone app by ImageChef Inc. where you insert a photograph of yourself, or of a friend, in different backgrounds – its sole purpose is to make you laugh. With 29 different backgrounds, you can have your face surrounded by girly hearts to send to your wantonly lustful significant other; or perhaps have your mug idolized in an art gallery with a man scrutinizing your picture carefully, hand under chin in the utmost of seriousness; or maybe your photo projected on a giant screen, behind a rock band playing with thousands of fans cheering; or, my personal favorite, you could place your photo on a cereal box with the auspiciously vague and childish name of Crunchy Crispies.

The process is simple. Choose a background template, then either upload an existing picture from your Photo Album, or take a new picture on the spot. Re-frame the picture as you see fit, then tap “done” to see your final product. What’s impressive is the graphics aren’t bad; some of them, in fact, look downright convincing upon quick first impression – most notably, the television and the projector screen behind the rock band. They’re all quirky, for sure, but they look good enough that for a quick practical joke from someone who doesn’t know how to use Photoshop, this is the app to have. You may customize the text in each background, for that added comical authenticity; now, your “Yearbook” photo can read “Jacqueline Judge, Class Genius.” When I graduated in 2002, I was voted “Most Fashionable,” but I consider that a close contender to Genius standing.

I toyed around with my boyfriend’s photo for awhile, sending it to some of his friends, with scandalous and suggestive titles under the WANTED template (use your imagination), but feel free to use this app for completely innocent intentions. The novelty may wear out soon, and the app doesn’t have much longevity, but it provides a quick laugh here and there, if not for comical achievement, then just for downright absurdity.

If you feel like trying Framed! for free, feel free to use one of our generously donated Promo Codes below:

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*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.

Although PS Mobile is no “CS4 in an iPhone”, which I can hardly blame as CS4 is massive, PS Mobile is a basic photo editor which is extremely user friendly and free.

The design of this app is quite nice because of the iPhone real-estate dedicated to the image you are editing. There are two bars (one on top, and the other on the bottom of the screen), which house buttons with drop down menus of features. There’s no memorization of what a button means so this is extremely user friendly from the get go.

With undo and redo buttons at full spectrum capacity, PS Mobile immediately gets points by me as most other photo editing apps are missing this crucial feature. This app also offers the ability to crop, rotate, and flip an image. The rule of thirds is included in the crop, which makes a composed photo almost too easy. Another drop down menu houses the control of exposure, saturation, tint, black & white.

Most of the photos that I’ve been working on have been from pictures of my doodles, drawings, and paintings, so I’m definitely testing the fringe capability of many of these photo editors. Because this is a free app, I’d say download it and play around. As I’m primarily looking for a photo editor that also allows me the creative freedom to do some drawing and fine detail photo editing, this is not my holy grail. But for the quick fix of your photo, I’ve found PS Mobile to be the fastest and easiest way to go. PS Mobile is the easiest app to use thus far because all functions are performed the same way: select how you want to alter the photo, then pull your finger across the screen to set the degree of the alteration.

I won’t review the site linked with the app (photoshop.com), but will give kudos that you can create a free account with access to 2gb of free photo space that you can use to free up space on your phone. Photoshop.com also allows you to edit your photos online, share them, and add descriptions. Check it out if it’s your thing.

Some of the other fun features of PS Mobile are the preset effects. Honestly, I find most of them a bit kitch, cheesy, and overall a waste of space, but then again I can see myself consistently using two to three of these (I’ll keep you guessing… unless you take a peek at my photos). I couldn’t help at scoffing at the “artistic” feature that offers a posterize feature called sketch, and a soft focus that I could see myself using with the inclusion of layers.

Bottom Line

PS Mobile is not the best to use for my drawing purposes, but when I tested it on “photo” photos I found it to be the most user friendly and functional app around. Some features are missing, but I’m pretty happy with the final product.

I started by downloading iRetouch Lite. As with all lite versions, the app had the feel of the full app, but without all of the bells and whistles. The main difference between the two is that you can save higher resolution photos (1536x2048px) with iRetouch, than lower resolution saves (default 640×480, but as high as 1024×768) in iRetouch Lite. The dpi difference here alone was enough for me to upgrade, especially when I found the full version for sale from the App Store at 50% off.

Positive Features

• You may continue your last session
• Undo (Redo in full version)
• Preview of effects prior to implementing (full version)
• Basic Tools (full version) and Retouch Tools (both versions)
• Blend Modes

To clarify, iRetouch provides an addition to the repetoire of iRetouch Lite with it’s Basic Tools, which provide for higher quality saving, easy photo crop, rotate, flip, resize, brightness/contrast, black&white, color temperature (warmer/colder), invert, unlimited undo and redo.

The Touchup Tools remain the same in both versions and provide the ability to clone stamp, smudge, brighten, hue, color, eraser, pencil, brush, and use stamps (which come in a variety of customizable shapes).

The true success of iRetouch comes in its Blend Modes. This is the closest to a Photoshop App (besides the real Photoshop) I’ve found. There are layman friendly descriptions of each blend mode and quite a bit of control in implementing them. Most of the work I have posted here takes advantage of the blend modes within iRetouch.

Future Changes I Want to See

• Redo in Touchup Tools
• Easier way to take photo from Basic Tools into Touchup Tools (and without quality loss)
• An offset drawing option would be nice
• More space between the edge of the photo and the edge of the app

My frustrations arose when i found the full version also does not include a redo in the Touchup Tools. Sometimes I tried something out only to accidentally hit the undo button and found I could not replicated exactly what I had errased. This could have been erradicated had I found a redo button, but alas I found none.

a different version I made with iRetouch Lite

My last serious petpeeve came up when I was trying to touchup details near the edges of my photos and found that I was hindered by the format of iRetouch. With in inability to zoom out far enough to bring the border of my photo into the center of the screen, some of the edges were unable to receive the same treatment as more accessible areas.

Face was lightened from a wash of shadow.

Bottom Line

iRetouch is a refreshing approach at easy photo editing with all of the extras to keep you happy. I have kept this app for months and keep going back to it over other photo editing apps. Try the free Lite version to get a feel for it, then find the full version for faster work.

The app itself is simple, but a little buggy.

Bugs

• Emails to PhotoFame
• Portrait oriented photos are sometimes Shmooshed (yes it’s a technical term!)

I wouldn’t normally let simple bugs bother me, but in this case they do because they infringe upon the success of the app working. You take a photo, add a simple note with it, and email if off to (hopefully) be picked up for massive distribution. The bugs take place in the portrait oriented photo’s dimensions in your outgoing mail, and in emailing your photo.

After choosing which of my babies, er photos, I wanted to sell, I uploaded and filled out the comment form attempting to make the who-what-where aid the photo’s appeal. When the PhotoFame email was generated for me, the portrait photo was stretched. I hardly think an agency will want a stretched photo! After that point my outbox continuously sent the photo automatically and I received over six emails back (all the same) telling me that SWNS cannot reply to every email individually (Apparently not as they can only reply to each email six times).

The irony was the best part of this app (that last sentence may be amended if I am contacted for the photos I sent, because the paycheck will then trump irony). Even then, the Terms and Conditions of SWNS states that I incur all copyright/intellectual property infringement and any other sort of liability. I also found it amusing that the contract states that content needs to be “not defamatory of any person, business or undertaking, does not bring any person, business or undertaking into disrepute and is not unfair, libelous, misleading or obscene…”. This is only amusing when considering that the Q and A suggests snapping celebrity photos (they do preface not to invade the celebrity’s privacy though…).

One last Negative Nancy to throw in: While choosing photos from my album, I can only look at the thumbnails. If I could scroll through them, I could more easily discern which photo is my winning ticket.

There is a bright side to this app. I can see the benefits to aspiring photographers, or lucky people. It’s never been so easy to send your work to a major agency! PhotoFame is an innovative idea, but the current version has a few kinks to work out. Once the problems have been eradicated, I can see this becoming not only frustration-free, but wildly popular in celebrity frequenting areas.

Bottom Line

For $0.99 this app is worth it depending upon how often you are surrounded by stunning/media hyped things. My suggestion is that if you happen to take a photo of amazement, download the app immediately following your photo capture. If you happen to have a binary warehouse of exquisite photos, download this app. You can be the judge.

On a simpler level, I downloaded the free app to my iPhone because I was in an unfamiliar town, on an unfamiliar couch, faced by an unfamiliar cat. My house sitting experience left me in social isolation and this seemed the perfect way to pass the time and fill that desire for social contact (without seeming desperate to all of my contacts on facebook and twitter).

PhotoZen is simply photosharing and loose social networking. There are no profiles, or names. You have your Zen tree, which periodically gets photos placed upon it by the network. You send out your photos to the cloud and they are placed randomly on another’s tree. If you like a photo that is placed on your tree, you can reply back with your own photo that is either taken on the spot or loaded from your camera roll, or you can simply give good karma or bad karma. From what I figure, Karma determines what kind of photos you get, but is pretty general on its targeting.

This is only loosely social networking because if you accidentally hit cancel on a photo from an anonymous person that you’ve been conversing with, you’ve lost that contact forever. This really brought the Zen element to play for me as I learned to give up my intangible possessions and friends.

As I began taking pictures with one hand and petting the suspicious cat with the other, my loneliness and isolation began to dissipate.  I was having real conversations without words. Using abstract images produced by zooming into the couch cushions closer than humanly possible into the pixelated world only known through technology. A few people got what I was doing, but for the most part people didn’t, which is ok because frankly it was different of me.

I spent an hour on PhotoZen conversing with a number of people who ranged from landscapes to abstract photos, drawings to lolcats. The images ran the gammut and while I wasn’t a fan of most of them, that is of no fault of the app. Aesthetic is so particular to the individual (I’m an aesthete snob), so when I made a visual connection I was impressed. To say that PhotoZen transcended my expectations might be a bit much.

My drawbacks are reserved to a few bugs and other users. As I mentioned before, you can loose touch with a conversation, which after searching for someone you connect with is deeply frustrating. The program itself sometimes doesn’t respond to the screen touch fast enough or doesn’t respond at all. My other gripe is desperate people trying to find dates (to put it nicely). There is a flagging feature for inappropriate photos, but that isn’t an instantaneous booting of the annoyance.

Ultimately it seems wrong of me to review this app with words so unlike other reviews where I space photos throughout. Here I will place them all together for you to decide if this free app is worth it. It was for me, and probably will be for you too.

opening picture of the app

a photo of my drawing that I sent out

my new nameless friend's reply

my new friend's photo response

my abstract photo sent out to the world

a reply to my abstract photo

a photo on my tree

composing my abstract response.

good lolcat karma

Many apps have been made to improve the somewhat lackluster limitations of the default iPhone camera – apps like Camerabag and Steadycam, the first offering different styles of artistic renderings, and the second curing that obnoxious tendency for the iPhone to produce blurred images by only taking a picture once a clear shot presents itself. Vintage B&W by Erik Pettersson is arguably one of the best in that it’s one of the most practical and expected, and best of all, it’s completely free (as it should be). With Vintage B&W, adding drama and oomph to your everyday pictures becomes as easy as pressing a single button. The power of a black and white photograph is definitely underestimated in the camera phone world.

The app functions as the default camera does, only once you take a picture it will prompt you to either use the image or retake it, should it not be to your liking. If you use the image, the app will “develop” the picture for you, and in a matter of seconds, you will have a clean black and white rendered picture of the original. My cat, Blue, is already lush with photogenic features and a dark, dramatic quality to his grey fur, but after using Vintage B&W, the contours of his face, those sharp delineations of his Egyptian nose and perfectly symmetrical ears become all the more stark and imposed, the tips of his fur highlighted against the darker curves of his body. Using the black and white capabilities of Vintage B&W made a casual hang-out with friends into a dusky soiree of ambience and lofty sensuality – idealized projections of reality. It’s easy to understand how the photographer constructs entire worlds of imagination with a single photograph.

One of the worst parts of the first and second generation iPhones was always the camera. It just seemed tacked on in a decidedly un-Apple way, a vestigial afterthought that, although integrated throughout the iPhone software, never felt as polished as it could. It was almost as if Apple put it there in a hissy fit of exasperation, just because you have to have a camera in a phone these days. But at least Vintage B&W will add some much needed character to however you decide to use your camera, candidly or creatively and anything in between.