Many photographers have taken to their iPhones as a second or third camera that’s always handy.  I know I sure have.  The various camera and photography apps available to us really help make the iPhone one of the most popular cameras in the world.  Here’s a review of Camera+ a photography and camera iPhone app with a huge bonus at the end!

Camera+ is a new photography iPhone app from Lisa Bettany of Mostly Lisa and it’s currently only $.99 in the iPhone app store.

What can you expect from yet another photography app on the iPhone platform?  Plenty.

From the image capture side Camera+ offers a grid, an image stabilizer, and a digital zoom.  All function well.

In the social scene that many of us have embarked on as photographers the ability to share images directly to Twitter, facebook, and flickr are quickly becoming must-haves in any new photography app and this one doesn’t disappoint.

The Lightbox

This feature is a bit unique to photography apps.  If you use the app to control the camera for image capture the images are saved in the Lightbox not in your photos library.  At first I found that to be an odd decision by the developers but after using the app over several days I now see the genius in this workflow.  I can snap away and edit images without cluttering my regular library.  Once I’ve decided which images or edits are keepers I can save those to the regular photo library.  This eliminates duplicate images that have occurred on occasion when using other iPhone photography applications.

FX and editing

Camera+ offers many different special effects to enhance images.  While some of them may be “over the top” for some photographers I found the bulk of the FX to be quite enjoyable and fun to play with.

The scene modes worked fairly well considering the limits of the iPhone as a camera and a computing device.  I found that the various settings for scenes helped give enjoyable corrections in contrast and color and actually went back to some of my older iPhone images and fixed a few of those with the scene settings.  This function worked much better than I thought because of it’s more nuanced approach.

The cropping and borders tools are both well done with many options and settings to work with.

Here are a couple of images I took and edited using Camera+

If you head to the Camera+ website you can see plenty of examples of images from photographers using the app.  The slideshow of images shows which FX and edit presets were used so you get a good idea of what can be done with this photography application.

Conclusion:

We’re giving Camera+ a

4 out of 5!

Bonus:

Lisa Bettany and tap tap tap are giving away a Canon 5D MarkII dream photo rig worth $10,000!  Go to the Camera+ website for more details and enter for a chance to win!  I did.