My key

Yesterday night at dinner, after an hourlong drive through thick Italian fog, Memet showed me photos he has taken with his iPhone recently. Although my iPhone 4S has a pretty good camera, I hardly use it seriously. I simply acknowledge that the camera is better than what my original iPhone had and that's it for me.

After all, proper photos are taken with a DSLR and maybe with an advanced compact - period!

When talking to Memet, though, and looking at some of his shots, I had to admit that there is something, which is worthwhile exploring. Memet is using an app called Instagram, in principle one of the many apps that apply dramatic filters to your photos and turn boring, mundane pictures into pieces of art.

Tonight I recalled that I have Snapseed on my iPhone, a similar app that I downloaded for free a little while ago. The interesting thing with this application is that it has been created by Nik Software, the same guys who created the software packages I use to achieve dramatic effects such as those you can see in my recent New York black and whites.

And even though Snapseed cannot do what I do on my Mac at home, look what it made out of a simple shot of my hotel room key I took with my iPhone:



This is pretty darn impressive!
It's hard to judge how good the quality is on the small phone display, but from what I can see this is really good...

Edit January 19th:
And what you can see now on this blog demonstrates that it remains really good when it's taken to the bigger screen, too. Unfortunately, Snapseed's output size does not come close to the iPhone's native 8 megapixel shots, which is likely due to computing power.
If it could deliver these effects on the native files, I'd have to admit that this could be a competitive tool for a photographer...