Photogene ($2.99, iTunes link) is a photo editing app that was recently featured in the iPhone commercial called “Student.” Photogene offers basic editing tools like cropping and color correction, and it allows you to perform the functions quickly and hassle free. Overall, it’s a polished app with a well-designed interface that works flawlessly on the iPhone. We found it an indespensable tool for anyone who likes to take photos with the iPhone and send them directly from the phone to friends and family.

What’s so special about Photogene is that it’s an introduction to how a touch interface can sometimes be quicker than its mouse-and-keyboard counterpart. Many of the features of the app, such as crop, work just a little bit more economically with your fingers touching the screen.

And the app is no slouch in its feature set. Mac users might even recognize how similar it is to iPhoto’s editing features. The following is a look Photogene’s feature set (although the developers promise more features will be added over time).

Crop



The crop allows you to delete unwanted sections of a photo. You position a box by dragging it around with your finger. To expand or shrink the box, you tap a corner and drag it. You then tap crop to cut out the area around the box.

There are 5 box dimensions (or shapes) to choose from: 1:1, 3:4 4:3. 9:16, 3:2. If you make a mistake, such as cropping too much, there is a reset button to go back a step or return the picture to its original form.

Rotate

The rotate feature lets your rotate the picture clockwise and counterclockwise, flip the photo vertically or horizontally, and straighten the horizon of your photo. With the straigthen feature, once you have corrected the horizon, a portion of the picture will be cropped so that it still retains a straight x-y axis.

Filters

The filters tab consists of three functions: sharpen, pencil, and effect. Sharpen works as the name applies, sharpening blurry areas to reveal lines and borders. Pencil gives pictures a pencil-drawn appearance (although this feature didn’t perform well in my tests). The effect filter applies three color tones to the picture: a sepia tone to make pictures look old, a negative tone that reverses out the colors, and a heat map tone.

Color Adjust

Color adjust contains the app’s most useful features. You can use the tools in color adjust to tone down a much too bright picture, add a little color to bone-white skin, and generally improve or enhance the vibrancy of your pictures. There are four different effects: levels (which is a histogram), exposure (contrast and exposure), colors (saturation and color temperatire), and RGB (red, green, blue).

Symbols

Symbols is a fun little feature that adds graphics like speech bubbles, stars, hearts, etc, to the photo. You can change the color of the shape and the shape’s border. You can also add text inside the shape and change the text’s font style and color.

Frames

The frames feature adds different styles of borders around your photo. There are 16 frames in all, ranging from rounded corners to drop shadows to simulating a motion picture frame. Also within Frames, you can change the background color beyond the borders of your photo.

Problems

For the most part, Photogene is a solid, polished app with very few hiccups. I did experience one major freeze up while adding a graphic to a picture that required me to restart the iPhone. I also wish there was a way to directly send a photo to the email client instead of having to close the app and open the iPhone’s Photo app.

Conclusion

Photogene is a simple but powerful photo editing tool for your iPhone. Its flawless interface offers hassle-free editing using the iPhone’s touchscreen that often works more economically than a desktop keyboard-and-mouse interface. Photogene is highly recommended for those who want to quickly touch up photos on their iPhone and send them off to friends and family.

Photogene is a $2.99 download in the iTunes App Store.

Name: Photogene
Developer: Omar Shoor
Version reviewed: 1.7
Price: $2.99
iTunes link: Click here