I saw a note about a software App for the iPad the other day and had to download it to give it a shake. It's a version 1.0, so there might be a couple of "gotchas" floating around, but I haven't seen any yet. I figure it was a free App, so what's the worst it could? Blow up the iPad? (figuratively) Since it was software , either Apple or the software writer would put up a fix pretty quickly, so why not play. Today's image comes from playing with just a couple sliders, after choosing what I wanted to work on. It was free, I was playing and I was impressed. Today's image was a finished image, having gone through Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 and a trip over to Adobe Photoshop CS5 and back, but there's always something more that can be done to an image. In this case it was taking a fully saturated image, with real good greens and some nice, plugged in clouds and antiquing it. Sort of takes it out of the modern day New York/Pennsylvania border area and puts in kind of a rural Appalachia locale. Makes the sturdy barns look a little more weather beaten and the foreground building a share croppers cabin. It just changes the mood of the image. To find out what this magical, free, iPad App is, hit the "read more".The App is called Luminance, from a company named Subsplash, Inc. It appears to have been released about ten days ago. Interestingly enough, their other Apps appear to be church related. Now, that's what I call a "leap of faith", thinking that a church app company could (would) come up with a pretty handy photo enhancement application. It's different alright.
Regardless of who wrote the app or what they done in other aspects of the creativity, Luminance is pretty slick. Pick what you want to do (fix white balance, hue/saturation [globally only - no tweaking individual colors], exposure and others and push a couple sliders around. Or they have some presets. If the preset gets you close, you can always kick a slider one way or the other to get the image to your liking.
The title of today's post is a bit of a stretch. I don't think designers and photographers and other creative types will be chucking CS5 in favor of Luminance or Nik Software's Snapseed any time soon, but we're still at the bottom of the hill when it comes to what can be done on any tablet.
Luminance, and Snapseed and a half dozen other Apps that are either out or on their way are making "instant photo finishing" in the field a real possibility.