Photogene for iPad: More features, more coolness

Who said you can't do content creation on the iPad? Every day, I am seeing more and more apps that allow you to create, modify, or extend content in ways that are approaching, but not yet quite equal to, what you can do on a desktop or full featured laptop.

A case in point is Photogene, a U.S. $3.99 app that has been upgraded from the iPhone version that we've positively reviewed in the past. The app has doubled in price, but comes with some significant updates like the ability to modify curves.

Photogene lets you crop and straighten photos, sharpen them, adjust levels and curves, apply filters, and create frames and selective blurs. No, it's not Photoshop, but you can really improve your photos and then export them by mail, Facebook, Twitter, or iPhoto. You can also just save them to your iPad photo gallery.

Having a much bigger screen to work on makes all the difference between this version and the iPhone incarnation. You probably can't make a bad photo good, but there are a myriad of enhancement tools that can make a good photo more interesting. Like all such apps, moderation is the key. Click here to see a video of the app in action.

I'm pretty surprised at the speed that apps are coming to the iPad. It seems that every time I visit the app store, there are updates to my older iPhone apps collection.

I think we'll see video editing, more sophisticated drawing tools, and audio editing apps that will go a long way to making the iPad a solid content creation tool.

Apple needs to respond to these initiatives by making it easy to get content on and off of the iPad. Options to do that now are limited and non-intuitive. It's a big issue for many potential buyers, and Apple would have to be deaf and blind to ignore the pressure. Maybe the necessary changes will be made, but how quickly is anyone's guess. Perhaps we'll hear something positive when version 4.0 of the software is previewed tomorrow.

Meanwhile, enjoy well thought-out apps like Photogene, and keep your fingers crossed.

Here's some shots of Photogene at work on one of my photos from Lake Powell:


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