Perhaps appreciating an app like PhotoForge means making sure your expectations are in line. No, this isn't going to be a full-scale Photoshop-like experience, because the iPad isn't a desktop. What you'll get with PhotoForge is a collection of interesting effects, a set of basic and rather sophisticated image adjustment options, and an altogether agreeable middleweight photo editing program.Photo editing programs can be real memory hogs on the desktop, so you might think that creating one for the iPad may be a little more than the jaunty tablet could handle. Surprisingly, the folks at Ghostbird Software have done an excellent job of delivering an app, PhotoForge, with an excellent of array of tools for massaging images.
Although the app's performance isn't as snappy as other kinds of programs on the iPad, it's more than acceptable when you take into account the demands graphics software places on a processor.
PhotoForge has a set of menus along the bottom of its main screen. There's a file menu for creating new images or opening photos from the iPad albums.
Beside the file menu are pop-ups for choosing brush shapes and sizes, as well as a color chooser. Brushes are used for drawing with the program and applying effects to photos. The color chooser defines a brush's color.
Drawing with the program has all the precision of finger painting. Using a gadget called the "Pogo stylus" -- something I picked up for poking the small icons on my iPod touch -- improves precision, but the tools for drawing are incomplete at best. For example, you can't fill areas of an image with the fill tool, only the whole screen. That's fine for tinting photographs, but a bit crude for drawing.
Sophisticated Adjustments
There's also a menu for cropping photos. From it, you can rotate an image in 90- or one-degree increments, as well as flip it horizontally or vertically.
Cropping is pegged to particular aspect ratios -- 1:1 (square), 4:3, 3:4 (vertical), 16:9 (wide) and 2:3. The crop box can be resized by dragging its corners with a finger. However you resize the box, though, the result will always be in the aspect ratio you've chosen for it.
The filter menu can be used to make adjustments and add effects to images. Adjustments range from sophisticated to basic.
In the sophisticated department, there's a curves filter for controlling the brightness and contrast of an image within tonal spectrums and in color spaces like RGB, CYMAK and CIE LAB.
There's a levels filter for custom configuring a black and white point in the image or in a color channel. It also lets you experiment with the gamma value in a photo, as well as control when highlights and shadows start clipping to give you better control of the contrast in an image.
It even permits you to simulate high dynamic range (HDR) processing in a photo. HDR is a method for improving the detail in an image by manipulating its shadows and highlights.
On the basic level, there are typical tools for sharpening images, as well as controlling their brightness, contrast, exposure, vibrance, saturation and hue. If you don't want to fiddle with sliders and such, you can have the program analyze your image and make all the adjustments it thinks should be made to perfect the photo. Similar auto enhancements can be done just for the white balance or exposure of an image.
Splendid Filter Set
For shutterbugs who want to get creative with their photos, PhotoForge has a splendid set of effects filters. There are some old favorites -- Dreamy, which places a glow around an image's edges; Vignette (Nasdaq: VIGN); Emboss; and Negative -- and some new tech ones, like Heat Map and Night Vision.
In addition, there's a set of art filters -- water color, oil paint and pencil -- as well as black and white and sepia ones. There's even a lomo filter to give an image's colors an over-saturated lomography look.
At the top of PhotoForge's screen is a toolbar for drawing and manually touching up photos. It's where you turn on the brush feature, for example, or activate the fill tool.
A pan/zoom feature is located on the bar. It lets you enlarge or shrink an image with a pinch or spread and move the image by dragging it around the screen.
There are also tools for cloning pixels from one area of a photo to another, smudging pixels and picking colors directly from the image.
A very powerful tool is the eraser. Not only does it remove brush strokes, but it will nix effects and adjustments, too. That allows you to do things like turn a color photo into a black and white image, then erase areas in it that you'd like to emphasize with color.
PhotoForge is an agreeable middleweight photo editing program that will do the basics for you, as well as let you release your creative juices when you hear your muse calling.
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