iPad: Photopad app reviewed.

One of the first things I used to tell people when they would ask me about my ipad and it's capabilities was, well you won't be editing images with it, but it's great for just about everything else. I found this app, not sure what I was looking for at the time but shh, and thought I would give it a try. Its free and does more than most people would know what to do with an image editing app...

You can change the saturation, automatically move a picture into a negative, grey scale, crop, zoom, it's really quite the little toolkit. Armed with this, a camera, the USB connector kit, you would be a lean mean mobile photography machine. I remember paying a couple of hundred dollars for a portable drive with a 1 inch LCD screen for offloading my cf card a couple of years ago. This was of course before you could buy a 32 gig cf card for 60$ at B&H... So to have this capability in the palms of your hands, really amazes me.

The Photopad allows you to make whatever changes you want and when done save it. To those of you, like me, that have irreparably damaged the original photo in the past, worry not it's saving a copy at all times. But wait, what would a review by Stefan be without some negatives....

Now I am not a photo editor, so the intuitive interface on this is great for me, there are a couple of points I would change (of course!!). The color balance scale is impossibly small and hard to use, the contrast and brightness scales seem to be really violent, now not sure if that is true of all programs, but if you get more than half an inch from center it's just about useless on most of the photos I have, that means that getting the perfect position when you don't have the infinite accuracy of a mouse, is a little tricky.

That being said the positives definitely outweigh the negatives on this little gem, its well worth the time and energy to download and learn this app. It's been permanently added to my arsenal and will get heavy use the next time I get out of town with my camera... Before then, I will get a USB kit so be ready for that post.