Press Release:Gesture 1.0 by Big Stone Phone – Photos to Paintings on iPhone/Touch

by Eric March on September 17, 2008 at 11:25 am

The wonderful world of photo manipulation has already entered the iPhone world through apps like Ezimba, which allow you to apply a variety of filters and special effects to images in your existing camera roll or photo library. By and large it’s pretty cool to have the ability to enhance and alter your images right on your device without ever having to pull them into Photoshop or Gimp or whatever you use.

If there is one fly in the ointment of such applications, it is that the filters are by design applied pretty uniformly, so you get the same sort of results no matter the photo you’re working with. Artistic effects, such as poiltilisation, water colouring, oil painting, and other digital art style photos, are nice, but you can always tell when they’re just virtual paintings derived from automatic filters because the filters do all the work for you based on preset algorhythms. Even if some of them are adjustable, the effects are largely the same and pretty recognizable.

This is why I’m rather fascinated by a new app from Big Stone Phone called Gesture. Yes, you’ve got the same sort of algorhythmic Photoshop-esque filters at work here, but the real difference is that they are not applied uniformly. They’re applied with your finger. At first blush this may not sound like it would make that much of a difference — but in practice, it’s all the difference in the world. First, the PR spin:

Albuquerque, NM – Big Stone Phone today has shipped a brand new revolutionary application for the iPhone and iPod Touch named “Gesture”. Gesture v 1.0 lets you create digital paintings from your photos simply by dragging your finger over the photo.

With just a little imagination, you can can make beautiful works of art. Be as rough or tight as you like as Gesture translates your movements into paint strokes using a sampled color from the photo below. Bringing a popular artistic technique from the desktop to the iPhone and iPod Touch, Gesture makes creating stunning works of art a breeze for the artist and non-artist alike.

Big Stone Phone cofounder and CEO of Stone Design, Andrew Stone remarked, “We had so much fun with iGraffiti, we conceived of a new way to make original art quickly and easily on your iPhone. What’s more, you can share and view your paintings with our online Public Art Space.”

Gesture has a simple model – you create works of art in your “Studio” and you view your art in your “Gallery”:

Gallery Features:
* View your masterpieces in landscape mode
* Add and delete paintings
* Share and view paintings from other Gesture users online

Studio Features:
* Save your painting to Photos
* Play back your painting like a movie
* Instantly Pointilize your photo
* Zoom in for detail work
* Unlimited undo
* Load any image on the internet

Pricing and Availability:
Gesture 1.0 is only $4.99 USD and available exclusively through Apple’s App Store. Other popular iPhone/iPod Touch titles by Big Stone Phone include: Twittelator Pro, iGraffiti and TalkingPics.

Gesture Home
Gesture Public Art Gallery
Gesture Screenshots
Gesture App Icon
Big Stone Phone iPhone Apps

Stone Design is a New Mexico based software corporation founded in 1984 by Andrew Stone which has shipped over 20 titles for Mac OS X and its parent operating system, the NeXT, in the last 20 years. Major applications include Create, a page layout and web authoring app, iMaginator for image processing and Videator for video effects and VJ’ing. This year, in conjunction with BigStonePhone, has added 4 iPhone applications to the collection: TalkingPics for field photography and audio recording, iGraffiti which lets you paint on photos and share them, Twittelator Pro – the ulitimate native Twitter client and now Gesture. Big Stone Phone is a collaboration between Stone, Jeff BIggus of Hyperjeff.net and artist and UI designer Ollie Wagner.

If had one complaint it’s that the only filter you get to work with is pointilize — which does make sense given that the whole, uh, point of poiltilization is to make an image from dots, a concept well suited to manipulation with your finger. Still, some of the possible results even from this are quite impresive indeed. The fact that you can zoom in for detailed work and set your brush size makes it possible to completely distance yourself from that telltale pointilize filter effect to create images that really do look like stylized paintings. Unlimited undo is a blessing, too, and the ability to playback the entire process of your painting as a movie is a nice touch.

The price here isn’t all that bad given what you get and what you can do with it. I’d have liked to see other effects, such as oil painting or watercolour — those would be great additions for future versions — but in its present form it’s still quite a respectable little app. Check out a little gallery below. I compiled those from the best of what they have in their gallery so you can get a good idea of what’s really possible with this little gem. I’ve also thrown some sreenshots in as well.