I love my iPhone. Not only is it the best smart phone that I have ever owned(and I’ve been through a lot of them), but it has a really good camera. Am I going to replace my SLR with it? Not likely, but as Chase Jarvis likes to say “the best camera is the one you have with you”. Since I don’t leave the house without my phone, I always have a good camera with me. Terry talked about the possibility of getting rid of his point and shoot camera all together recently over on his tech blog here in favor of his iPhone. Since I use my iPhone camera so much I have a slew of apps aimed at making my photos better, or tweaking them to my liking. One thing I have been on the lookout for is an app that has controlled vignettes. After some searching I found FocalLab for the iPhone. I was only looking for vignette control, but this app surprised me and does a whole lot more, and does it well!
 

Functionality

Like I said I went looking for vignette control, so of course you know that this app does it well. The control is similar to Lightroom’s vignette control, well actually more like Lightroom2’s vignette control. There is a slider that adds a nice fading vignette starting in the corners and increasing toward the center until it looks like a perfect black circle. The transition or fade is gradual until you’re at the extreme end of the slider so it looks natural. The surprises that I found in this app were the blur effects. FocalLab offers four styles of blur, each having its own slider like the vignette. Dreamy Blur and soft focus are really the same type of blur, soft focus being a little more heavy handed or “stronger” if you will. Zoom blur is exactly as it sounds. It creates an area of sharp focus in the center of the image with blur radiating toward the edges. Motion blur is a really cool effect that gives your image the appearance that the object photographed is in motion. This is actually the best version I have seen in a mobile app. Generally to create a motion blur after the image is taken with the quality that this app provides, Photoshop is involved. FocalLab also provides the option for black and white conversion, as well as resizing. These features work ok, but to be honest I prefer to use other apps that have more control for these tasks.
 

What I’d like to see…

While this app does a really good job at blurring and creating vignettes, I would like to have the ability to place the center of the blur, and/or vignette where I want it. I don’t always want the center of my blur to be in the center of my image. The same goes for my vignettes. Sometimes I would like to see more vignetting from one side or another. Is this nit picking? Sure, but I can ask can’t I?

You can get FocalLab from the iTunes store for $.99 here from the FocalLab - Nexvio Inc.