Pencil Camera for iPad
This is an application for adding filters to your photos on the iPad. It can be photos that you have taken already and are in your camera roll, or it can be photos that you are about to take. In fact, these artistic filters can also be applied to iPad video . These will be the sort of filters that you could expect to find in something like Instagram and in terms of general usage should be used sparingly. If every photo that you shared online in the various places for sharing used these filters, then it could get very old hat, incredibly quickly.
A wooden interface for Pencil Camera
I suppose to a certain extent the interface does look quite nice, but at the same time I don’t think it makes full use of the design possibilities that are available within iOS. Do you really need the illusion of carved wood on the sliders for the exposure, contrast and line quality? Is it really necessary to have the ripped paper frame around the photos that you are working on? Despite the overuse of the wood theme the application is okay to look as and pretty easy to use. You get an immediate feedback on the changes that you make using the sliders and also when you are changing from one filter to another.
Read about Ink Artist iPad
Pink glasses and Life on Mars?
You can tap on a button and pick your filter and choose how you want to enhance or destroy your photo, starting with a water colour effect. You have 18 filters to choose from and you can only choose them one at a time. The only way to have a cumulative effect with your filters would be to save an image out with one effect upon it, bring it back in again and apply another. Whether you are using one filter effect or more than one, it is possible to come up with some quite interesting looking images.
Some of the filters work by adding a texture to the overall image and then some other filters work more by finding the edges in the image. When those edges in the image are found by this application for your iPad, it does things like thickening up lines for emphasis. You can get some sorts of effects that imitate the use of watercolour or crayons and it can also make your photo look like it was drawn with soft pencils.
Hipster culture and video
There was the movie called ‘A Scanner Darkly’ that had Keanu Reeves in it, that was Roto scoped to give a weird moving cartoon effect to the standard filmed movie shots . It was very strange to watch this movie with it being not normal video and neither was it cartoon. When you shoot video using Pencil Camera for iPad, something similar happens with the action looking stranger the more you crank up the settings. Not something that you would want to do very often, but could be entertaining if used sparingly.
The NoStylus verdict on Pencil Camera
The effects that you get are quite specialised and are likely to only be useful in occasional circumstances. Despite that, the application is quite useful and fun to play with. I would recommend that you give Pencil Camera HD a try and see if it fits in artistically with what you want to do with your photos and video.
