This review originally appeared within iLounge’s iOS Gems series within the compilation article, iPhone Gems: Top Photography and Image Manipulation Apps. Additional details may be found in the original article.
Differentiated only by name and effect, GritPix, HiCon, and GothPix ($1 each) are essential three slightly different versions of the same basic photo filtering application. Available exclusively for the iPhone, each application opens directly into the iPhone’s camera view, allowing the user to snap a picture, which can then be moved and scaled or rejected and re-shot.
Unfortunately, the apps do not let the user apply the filters to a saved image, limiting their usefulness. Once an image has been decided upon, each application applies a different filter to the image, saving it to the Camera Roll and displaying the resulting image to the user on a simple screen with an exit button. Images are saved in 1600×1200 resolution, the maximum possible resolution of the iPhone’s camera.
With nothing notably wrong with the functionality of any of these three applications — all three do exactly what they claim, and do so without any noticeable hang-ups, crashes, or other problems — the only issues are pricing and value.
When one considers that for the combined price of all three, they could purchase a more full-featured version of the same idea in CameraBag—which offers the ability to work with saved images—or spend an extra $2 and get filter capability along with more robust image adjustment tools, it’s hard to justify the $1 price per app here. Judging each on its own is more an evaluation of personal taste rather than technical merit, and each is likely to appeal to a different group of users. Because it’s hard for us to want to keep multiple apps around to perform one function with only slight differences, all three miss earning our recommendation; if they were combined into an app with the same or similar pricing, and the developer added the ability to apply the filters to saved images, it would be a better value.
