I was excited to see last week that Camera + finally released an iPad version of their app. They were one of the first photography apps realized for the iPhone and although it was a little more time consuming to use compared to other photography apps always gave you a decent amount of control and had some solid filters. I used to use it often to touch up my iPhone snapshots and wondered why they never ventured into the iPad world.

Now the wait is over and don’t get me wrong it’s a solid app just unfortunately leaves much to be desired. Sometimes I think our expectations can get in the way, just like when everyone is talking about a great new movie and by the time you finally get to see it think its just OK because of all the hype. Thats a little how I feel about the Camera + app. The team that created Camera + has also released some amazing quality iOS apps and I was hoping that they could take the Camera + app up a notch and innovate some cool new features for the iPad. What they have is basically a larger version of the Camera + app with a few additions. Don’t get me wrong the additions are nice just really not as comprehensive of an app compared to others I really like (Photoforge 2 and Snapseed are still 2 of my favorites). Here is a look into the Camera + app for iPad.

First the app starts with the Lightbox just like they have in the iPhone app. Here you can import images from your photo libary, Flickr or Facebook. One of the new features that is really nice if you use the iPhone app a lot is that you can sync your iPhone Camera + lightbox along with the iPad so all your images can be in sync across devices.

Once you have an image importing editing is very straightforward and pretty much what you would expect if you have used the iPhone app. You have 5 main sections along the bottom to edit your images:

Scenes – Scenes give you some easy presets to adjust your images. Some of these work really well and are very useful. I personally love the flash scene which will give your iPhone images taken with some backlighting a nice fill in the shadows. I’ve seen images very underexposed and have used this to bring up the shadows while also keeping the image looking clean.
Adjust – The adjust menu gives you access to a few key adjustments you can make like rotating, straighten, white balance, tone, red eye, detail and vignette. In all of these you also do have some control for example with the vignette you can control the amount and radius of the vignette.
Crops – Pretty standard cropping options, you can choose a freeform crop or certain aspect ratios.
FX Effects – The FX filters give you 36 filters just like you have in the iPhone app. One of the nice options though is you can modify the intensity of the filters and even brush in the fx effects to a certain part of the image. This combined with the fact that you can layer effects on top of each other is the main part of the app that I like.

layering effects on top of each other

painting in effects

Borders – You have the option to add 9 different borders to the image. The borders are all pretty good quality and you do have the ability to add a caption to the border.

Overall I would give the app a 3.5 out of 5 stars. It’s only $.99 right now so for a buck gives you some nice filters and performs well just not as great as some other more robust apps and again not what I was hoping for from TapTapTap.

You can get the app in iTunes here:

Camera+ for iPad - tap tap tap

Whats your favorite photo editing app? Leave a comment below.

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