I have little or no idea about some of the things you mention. By
design I guess... but have to admit that I'm now on my second
(non-phone) Android device. The first was a Kindle Fire which is only
partially Android. I used it as a reader and game machine but wanted to
also use it for controlling some aspects of my house remotely when I
travel. But it was not sufficiently pure Android to perform the task.
So I've had to upgrade to a Google Nexus 7. This is much more a general
purpose computer than the Kindle was but shows some rough edges in
occasional lockups and a lack of regimentation in the app world... they
don't all do certain common tasks in the same predictable manner. And
very unlike the Kindle it has a low res front facing camera and a GPS.
For $10 it can be turned into a functioning travelers GPS which (unlike
the freebie Google stuff) will download all the maps of the US and
Canada or other parts of the world (for much more money). It does do
the job (got me from New York to North Carolina so far) but has a few
rough edges of its own. But I can't complain for $10.
Chuck Norcutt
On 12/26/2012 2:32 PM, jfwilcox wrote:
> Much of my vacation time has been devoted to learning to use my phone
> adequately and to continue getting some use from my iPad 1.0. There
> had been a thread on photo apps a month or so ago. I guess I have a
> little to add to the subject.
>
> It appears that the trend in photo apps is 1) to make it easy to
> "lomo" your cellphone pics, and 2) to become your "cloud." I don't
> want either of these things, and so my evaluations are colored by
> that. I was intrigued to stumble on Photoshop Express, which is free
> I think because it wants to suck you into its own cloud structure.
> Disappointing to me is that the iPad version is different from the
> Android version. That is axiomatic, I suppose, but they have made no
> attempt to make the two versions work essentially the same or even to
> offer all of the same features. PS Express lacks several of the
> features that keep me in the PS stable otherwise: highlight/shadow
> tool is one of the key ones. Despite offering its own cloud, PS
> Express works well with my cloud of choice, Dropbox. I have Dropbox
> set up so that I have a special email address to send photos from
> applications to a special folder. (One of the apparent limitations
> of Dropbox is that one can only do file manage ment such as deleting
> or moving files from the host computer, not from a mobile device. I
> don't know if that is absolute or if I just haven't probed enough.) I
> have not yet explored Google Drive, which I will pursue when I get a
> Round Tuit, nor Picasa.
>
> Snapseed is now owned by Google and is free, which accounts for its
> three-star rating, as it is now slammed in the reviews by people who
> paid good money for it a week before Google made it a free app.
> Otherwise people seem to love it. It is more oriented to "effects"
> for the lomo-instagram crowd IMHO. All of these programs offer to
> tools to change hue, saturation, brightness, contrast and work fine
> for basically unproblematic images. Within Snapseed's "tune image"
> menu are most of the controls I am interested in, and I like the
> "ambience" control, which is a lot like the controls in LR and Bridge
> which enhance and intensify color without ramping up actual
> saturation. Recommended if this is all you need.
>
> Filterstorm has the greatest flexibility of all the apps I've tried,
> but it is also more complex and has an actual learning curve to use
> its masks and layers features. It doesn't work anything like PS on a
> computer, but it offers more tools to match it than other apps.
> Still lacks highlight-shadow correction, but offers levels and curves
> tools, which work well, even if they are a little fiddly. If I could
> have only one program, it would be this. Bear in mind that I am the
> type that prefers PS to LR and have never done a batch correction on
> a series of photos in my life. Simplicity and convenience are not
> the primary things I am looking for.
>
> Speaking of which, there are some Android apps that get raves, like
> Camera FX Zoom. This sort of app is not just for photo manipulation
> but takes over your camera operation as well. I am not too
> interested in this. The Galaxy S3 has a decent camera. Getting good
> photos with it is more dependent on technique than apps IMHO. These
> apps are useful if you wish to shoot, manipulate, and then email or
> text the result right there on the fly. Not my thing.
>
> Finally, it is a challenge to attempt to make the output from iOS
> apps work with Android stuff and vice versa. Naturally, Google has
> done more to make this possible than Apple, since Google has been
> catching up and drawing the public away from Apple. In general, I
> like the wild and wooly world of Android as I have the plug and pray
> mentality of an inveterate Windows user. It would have been easier
> just to have gotten an iPhone and stayed in the Apple ecosystem. My
> experience makes me appreciate the maturity of Apple in this area,
> but I like life outside the hive, so to speak. I am not trying to
> instigate a platform fight, but to provide disclosure, as my opinions
> are shaped by my eclectic experience and may be worthless both to
> Apple and Google partisans alike, assuming they are of any interest
> to anyone at all.
>
> Joel W.
>
>
>
>
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