Film Lab for your iPhone

15/08/10

Film Lab is, as the name suggests an editing program which allows you to simulate the look of various films on your iPhone images. The first iteration had 79 different options, which I thought was pretty amazing, these included all the common looks like Kodak Tri X, Kodacolour 2 etc and a few more unusual ones with quite a few stock effects that could simulate faded/aged prints.

Now if you were going to update such a program how many extra options do you reckon you would add, perhaps 10 or 20? Film lab has added an extra 272!

The program not only adds simulations to the images, it also has quite a good set of editing options to fine tune your image prior to the application of the film effect. The image tuning options include:

Brightness and Contrast, Colour Adjustment, Hue and Saturation, Sharpness and Blur.

In other words all the core things one needs to tweak an image are there. The only feature I would really like to see is some form of cropping option, certainly most other similar programs have this and the lack of it forces you to use another program and risk some quality loss in the process of re-saving and compressing.

As for the film effects they are divided into several categories which makes it far easier to find the one you want, this was my main gripe with the first version as you had to flip through a whole heap of other effects to find the one you wanted unless you could remember the number of the effect you needed.

A simple feature I appreciate is the program has a “recent” option which remembers the last setting you used and even better you can save favourites.

Probably for me the most exciting feature is the ability to get a whole raft of sepia options, frankly most programs totally overcook sepia and produce images that are quite tacky but with film lab you obtain anything from almost straight mono through to completely over the top sepia. Additionally you can simulate all sorts of split tonings and other exotic tintings. Cool indeed.

Of course you can undo any effects you apply and interestingly upsize image and even control the way the blur and sharpening are applied, choosing slower higher quality options if desired.

Film Lab is an utterly fabulous program but it will prove most powerful for users who have some prior knowledge of photographic processes and film characteristics, but even those with a casual interest will obtain gorgeous results with little trouble.