Photo filters galore for your iPhone pix

CameraBag [App Store link] joins the club of iPhone apps that offers filters for your photos to change the style or color balance of what you have snapped. The app sells for US$2.99.

This app offers filters that mimic old film emulsions of the past, as well as offering fish eye views and infrared simulation.

Here's the complete list:

Helga - A square-format toy camera with washed-out highlights and old-school vignetting.
1974 - This is your father's camera. Faded, tinted, and hip.
Magazine - Emulates effects used in fashion magazines
Lolo - Shoot from the hip and take life as it comes with vibrant, colorful shots.
Cinema - Dramatic, moody, wide-screen stills from the movie of your life.
1962 - Dynamic black and whites from the photojournalists of a bygone era.
Mono - Smooth gradation from black to white.
Infrared - Simulation of the popular landscape photography technique.
Fisheye - Popular fish eye lens effect - try it in combination with other filters.
Instant-emulates the old Polaroid look
Original - The unaltered image.

Some of the filters are subtle. Some are pretty dramatic. I didn't find any of them to be horrible. The app gets good reviews from users, except due to some legal issues from Polaroid, the borders of the images were changed and don't really look like the old Polaroid prints, so users are unhappy with the new filter. The developer is working that out, and is referring users to the US$0.99 version of the app, CameraBag Lite retro, [App Store] which still has the older filter.

The app was stable in my use, and allows you to email the finished images, or save them to your camera roll. The developer is also working on a desktop version of the app for both the Mac and PC. There are lots of apps offered that do similar effects. Ultimately, you need to choose the one that best fits your needs. I think the CameraBag filters do a nice job, and are easy to use. They are certainly worth a look.

Here are filters I applied on a landscape photo, along with the original for comparison:

CameraBag filter examples

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Source: http://www.nevercenter.com/camerabag/

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iPhone App Store App Review

CameraBag [App Store link] joins the club of iPhone apps that offers filters for your photos to change the style or color balance of what...

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Rowley

What happened to Ansel?

July 02 2009 at 3:47 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

turim

cool app - bought it right after reading the review and comments here!

it seems perfect for getting this little `touchÂ´ of something when you want to add photos to your contacts.

June 30 2009 at 5:13 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris

The Lolo effect is emulating a Lomo camera

June 08 2009 at 11:48 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris

The Lolo effect is emulating the Lomo camera

June 08 2009 at 11:34 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

callisto9

I've had this app for awhile and really love it. For the price, it was great. The filters are pretty cool. I do miss the polaroid borders, but oh well.

This app is a keeper.

June 08 2009 at 11:02 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

jayjay

Most of these seem like "novelty-apps" that aren't really that useful. I love Photogene with its sharpening tools. I realize this is a filter-post, but are there really not ANY noise-removal tools like Noise Ninja, Neat Image or similar for the iPhone?

Sharpening, contrast and level-correction and perhaps color tweaking really improve iPhone photos, but noise is probably one of the biggest issues with cameras that are bad att handling low-light situations.

June 08 2009 at 8:01 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to jayjay's comment

Hank Cazorp

Search the app store for "NoiseBlaster." It may be what you're looking for.

June 08 2009 at 9:33 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Nathan

This app is brilliant. It's the perfect companion to the 2mp camera, and the filters often turn a pretty crappy grainy pic into a more artsy version. Easy to use and worth it in my opinion.

June 08 2009 at 6:46 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tom C

I have been using Camera Bag since it was first released and really love it :) It did have some issues at first, and did occasionally crash due to lack of memory. But, of late with a new update the app has been performing perfectly!

I work as a photographer and still shoot a lot of film and I actually quite enjoy being able to use some of these different 'film effects' on my iphone images. Really nice fun application, one of the more used apps on my phone!!

June 08 2009 at 6:43 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Christian Brecheis

Unfortunately the Polaroid borders needed to be changed to look distinctivly different from the real Polaroids for copyright reasons.

I've been using the previous versions of Camera Bag and faced crashes a few times as well as slow performance. With the new version this seems to be fixed. The performance is perfect to just flick through a few filter versions of the photo you just took. It's fun, the filters are not too much over the top.

June 08 2009 at 3:46 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Maddy

There are lots of apps offered that do similar effects. Ultimately, you need to choose the one that best fits your needs. I think the CameraBag filters do a nice job, and are easy to use.

June 08 2009 at 2:14 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply