FX Photo Studio is a great addition to your iPad Darkroom

It seems that new photo cap­ture and edit­ing tools for Apple’s iOS devices are being released every day. Often they’re aver­age qual­ity tools avail­able for a buck.

Occa­sion­ally you find some­thing that’s a bit excep­tion­al, and that’s what I’m look­ing at today: FX Photo Stu­dio.

Designed for the iPhone, though it will run on an iPod Touch and iPad (scaled, not nat­ive dis­play), this app is all about the fil­ters and effects — 181 bundled with the $2.99 app and more avail­able for in-app purchase.

I’ll list the full fea­ture set below, but here’s a few that really make this app dif­fer­ent from most photo edit­ing apps:

Stack­able effects
As you apply effects and fil­ters to your image, the app keeps track of what you’ve applied and how you’ve adjus­ted each effect. Once you’re done, you can save out your ‘set­tings’ for use again — a great time-saver if you want to apply the same effect to a bunch of photos.

And you can also share these pre­sets with oth­er FX Photo Stu­dio users.

Lots of fil­ters and effects
Ok, maybe this is a little over the top, but over 180 dif­fer­ent things you can do to your image, in addi­tion to the basic crop, rotate, Gamma adjust, etc.

I must admit, not all the effects were to my taste (espe­cially the ‘greet­ing card like’ illus­tra­tion effects, but there’s more than enough here to keep me busy otherwise.

Shar­ing
This is almost a giv­en these days thanks to Ins­tagram, but every photo app should have the abil­ity to let you eas­ily share pho­tos with your friends on your favour­ite social media net­work. FX Photo Stu­dio cur­rently sup­ports Face­book, Twit­ter, Flickr and Tum­bler — as well email.

The full list of features
So, for less than the price of a premi­um cof­fee, here’s what you get in FX Photo Stu­dio, as of ver­sion 3.1:

- 181 photo effects and filters
— 19 Categories
— Intu­it­ive, easy to use interface
— Pos­sib­il­ity to mix dif­fer­ent effects
— Adjustable para­met­ers for all effects
— Pre­sets — to save sequences of effects and apply them on oth­ers pic­tures in just one tap
—  Share pre­sets via Pre­set Codes
—  Import pre­sets via Pre­set Codes
— Mul­tistep Undo and Redo
— Crop image
— Crop area rotation
— Rotate and flip image
— Bright­ness adjustments
— Ran­dom fil­ter selec­tion option
— Add to Favorites
— Hide Unused Effects
— Take Instant Photo with ran­dom effect fea­ture (for iPhones only)
— Eas­ily import pic­tures from Photo Albums on your device
— Auto­mat­ic rota­tion of pic­ture impor­ted with wrong orientation
— Por­trait and land­scape modes supported
— Res­ult­ing images can be saved to “Cam­era Roll” or “Saved Pho­tos” or ‘Doc­u­ments’
— High res­ol­u­tion sup­port up to 2592×2592 pixels (for iPhones 4)
— Copy Image to Clip­board from the app for later use in oth­ers apps
— iPhone 4 Ret­ina dis­play support
— Image res­iz­ing option when upload­ing images to online services
— Easy image shar­ing between iDevice and com­puter via Doc­u­ments folder
— Pos­sib­il­ity to rearrange and organ­ize the order of Cat­egor­ies and Effects
— Built-in shar­ing via Flickr, Face­book, Twit­ter, Tumblr or E‑mail
— Full iPhone and iPod Touch com­pat­ib­il­ity (all versions)

My take
Over­all sol­id value for a sol­id photo edit­ing app. It won’t be the only app in my iPad dark­room, but it’s one that’ll get fre­quent use, espe­cially with the tex­ture and grunge effects.

The sheer num­ber of fil­ters and effects can be a bit daunt­ing at first, but after you become famil­i­ar with them, and their loc­a­tion in the organ­iz­a­tion cata­logue, find­ing them is easy.

I really like the abil­ity to lay­er effects, and then save out the fin­ished effect lay­er as a preset.

And, they’ve got a great blog show­ing off new and user sub­mit­ted examples of fil­ter com­bin­a­tions, con­test announce­ments and news.

Bonus
The developer is offer­ing a Valentines Day spe­cial — FX Photo Stu­dio is on for $1.99.

Check out the developer­’s video:

Dis­clos­ure: A sample of this product was provided for review by the man­u­fac­turer or their agent.

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