iPhone App: CameraBag

February 8th, 2009

= 5 stars

CameraBag provides several unique image filters for pictures taken with your iPhone camera.

The Good

• Simple and intuitive navigation. A camera icon lets you take pictures within the program using the iPhone camera. Your new photograph is labeled “Original.” Touch the title and a drop down appears, letting you select a filter. You can also swipe left or right to cycle through the filters. When you find an effect you like, touch the save icon and the image is saved to your camera roll. All of this occurs before a black background, making concentrating on the photographs easy.
• The filters are Helga (meant to simulate the Holga plastic camera), Instant (mimics a Polaroid snapshot), Mono, 1962, Fisheye, Infrared, Lolo (Lomo camera simulation), Cinema, and 1974. My favorites have been Helga, Instant, Lolo, and 1974 — all because of their retro, lo-fi feel.
• You can filter any photographs in the Camera Roll or your Library. This means you can apply filters to iPhone screen captures or images downloaded from the Internet.
• Preferences allow tweaking of which filters are available via swiping, output size, and cropping and border effects.

The Bad

• A bit resource-intensive: I’ve gotten a few warnings about memory running low and one message that the program quit.

Conclusion

Instead of trying to improve the iPhone camera through better resolution and sharpening filters, CameraBag does the opposite — filtering images to make them resemble old, obsolete technology like plastic cameras and Polaroids. The cool part is the pictures look better as a result. Highly recommended.

iTunes App Store Link: