Alt Photo
Review

Alt Photo for iPhone
Developer: Alien Skin Software
Available from: iTunes App Store
Price: $0.99
Alt Photo

Alien Skin Software makes a number of fine photography applications. Alt Photo is their first iOS app. It lets you alter and filter your photos in a variety of nostalgic ways.

Alt Photo is fun. It’s a simple, inexpensive photo modifier that, like many others, converts your images by filtering them into thirty-six moods, vintage looks, and monochromes. It also includes a varied selection of sixteen borders to frame your masterpieces. There are a series of before and after examples in this review.

Alt Photo was created to amuse, and it isn’t really meant to be a serious photography application. Convert a photo of your house into something that looks like it was photographed in the 70s with a Kodak Instamatic camera. Make a vintage Daguerreotype of your kids and get results that are far better than ones from those lame mall kiosks. Loads of creative fun here.

The interface shows you thumbnail previews of your selected photo, eliminating the need to apply each one to see the results. Unfortunately, if you apply an effect and want to compare it to your original, there is no way to accomplish that unless you undo it or save altered the image to your photo roll. That’s easy enough to do, but it involves extra steps. Your photo roll begins with the newest photos on the left and scrolling to the right goes back through your photos.

At the outset, the app asks you to select a square or 3×4 aspect ratio. Cropping happens automatically and some photos will suffer a bit as a result. From then on, you can see thumbnails of all of the preset effects by swiping vertically to select a film style (Color Film, Vintage Color, Toy Camera, B&W Film, B&W Print, B&W Vintage) and then horizontally to see the variants within that style. There is a good-sized selection of nostalgic film types: Kodachrome, Scratched Tintype, Agfacolor, Kodalith, Tri-X, Daguerreotype, aged 35mm slide file, and thirty others.

Built into the app are ways to share your creations via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and e-mail. You can even add captions before sending them.

If you’re in the mood to play or want to have a good time amusing your friends and family, you can’t go wrong here for $0.99. This ain’t fine art, it’s just good, clean fun.

MyMac review rating is 8 out of 10.