Snapture: What the Camera App Should Have Been
by Eric March on April 6, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Last December, a new camera app was released for the iPhone. It was called Camera Pro, and it featured many of the features that the built-in iPhone camera app should have had, such as digital zoom, burst mode, self-timer, and so on. It was an excellent upgrade to the built-in camera app — but it came at a price. $30, to be exact, which ain’t cheap, even for a premium iPhone app like this. (Something that the fine folks at DreamCatcher found out recently.)
If you’ve been hankerin’ after a premium replacement for the built-in iPhone camera app but haven’t been willing to part with a trio of sawbucks for it, then your prayers have been answered. Snapture is a new app on Installer, and it does everything Camera Pro does and more. And perhaps more importantly, it does them for free. I took it for a spin this morning (my usual morning trip to Tim Horton’s being the perfect excuse) testing out all of its features, and I have to say, this is definitely the app that should have been built-in to the iPhone in the first place. After the jump, I’ll go through a feature-by-feature breakdown, including a ton of screenshots and images taken with Snapture.
The Main Interface
As soon as you load the app you get a good overview of what Snapture is all about. Along the top are toggle buttons for various features. On the right-hand side (or top if you’re using it right-hand portrait) is a zoom slider, and along the bottom are buttons for preferences, help, and so on.
Leveller:
This option doesn’t do much — it just displays an overlay on the viewfinder screen that shows the 8 cardinal directions. What it’s great for however is lining up your shot to make sure it’s level. As you can see from the shot below, I fail at this.
Digital Zoom:
I’ve never been a fan of digital zoom. I’ve never really seen the point, frankly, since it doesn’t improve the detail of the images, it just enlarges from the center and antialiases, the same as if you were to do it in an image editor. Still, there are those that do use it, it’s a handy feature to have, and it’s probably the biggest oversight with the built-in camera app. What makes this digital zoom cool though is that you have complete control over the zoom level from 1x to 3x thanks to the slider. It doesn’t just pop straight into one of the selected zoom levels, it’s a smooth zoom, so you can zoom just a hair above 1x, or somewhere between 2x and 3x — whatever you want. The quality of the digitally zoomed images is about what you’d expect. The shot below features cropped 320×240 sections of a full 1600×1200 image to show full detail.
Burst Modes, Black & White:
One of the cooler features here are the burst modes. These will let you snap three shots in quick succession. (This is not configurable — yet, anyway.) There are two modes: Fast, and normal. Fast will take three shots in 1 second intervals, while normal will take three shots in two second intervals. The size of the resulting images is the same, based on image size settings (see below). The screen will display the image it’s currently taking. Additionally is the option of taking photos in black & white, in case you’re feeling all artsy-fartsy. The shots below were reduced to 320×240 in size so I could fit them all into one comparison display.
Image Size:
Another feature conspicuously absent from the built-in camera app is the option to choose image sizes. Fortunately, Snapture comes to the rescue here, too. There are three sizes you can cycle through from the main viewfinder screen: Small (960×720), Medium (1280×960) and Large (1600×1200). The choice of sizes is a bit odd, as the smallest size isn’t even half the largest; it seems that more common sizes of, say, 640×480, 1024×768, and 1600×1200 would probably make more sense in the context of using different image sizes for E-Mailing or just saving memory. Still, the option is nice to have regardless, and there’s no loss of image quality, just size.
Self-timer and Image Quality:
Although there is no way to alter image quality taken by the app, it is neverless still as good as you can get with the built-in camera. The compression levels are no worse than with the original camera app (presumably, it simply uses the compression routines that are already present in Darwin) so you needn’t worry whether the pictures you take will differ in quality from the original. The 5-second self-timer feature is also quite handy for setting up self-portrait shots — even ones as frightening as mine.
Background Processing, Prefs ‘n stuff:
There are a number of toggles in the preferences you can use to customize to your image taking experience. Silent mode will turn off the shutter sound for covert snapshots. Fast Burst toggles whether you’re using the 2-second (slow) or 1-second (fast) mode. Auto Rotation will let you disable the accelerometer use so you can take images at any angle you want without having it flip the images to landscape when you rotate the iPhone. Leveller toggles the screen leveller overlay. One of the more interesting features here is that Snapture also performs background processing of images, so you can still take pictures or use the app immediately after you snap a shot off. The spinning wheel will appear while it’s processing, but that’s just to let you know it’s doing its thing; you can still do your thing at the same time. Up to 4 consecutive images can be taken and it will process them in the background while you keep on truckin’. Any more than that though and it will disable the shutter temporarily until a spot opens up in the processing queue.
Conclusion:
This is a fantastic app. It is feature-rich, quick, and intuitive to use, and it does everything the original iPhone camera app should have, and more. I’d like to see more image preprocessing features though, such as white balance, brightness and contrast, and hue and saturation adjustment — but that’s just a wish list. As-is, Snapture is a must-have for iPhone users who want more out of the camera.
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