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iPhoto (for iPad) Review

editors choice horizontal
4.0
Excellent
By Michael Muchmore

The Bottom Line

Apple photo-editing app for its world-leading tablet helps you organize, fix, and share photos using an interface that dazzles. For more effects, look to Snapseed or Adobe Photoshop Touch, but iPhoto will be more than enough for most users.

MSRP $4.99
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Pros

  • Beautiful interface.
  • Good editing tools and effects.
  • Photo organization helpers.
  • Share on Facebook.
  • Journals let you create and share attractive photo scrapbooks.

Cons

  • Limited adjustments and effects compared with Snapseed and Photoshop Touch.

There's no shortage of photo-editing apps for iOS, many of them well-suited to the larger (and now retinal) screen of the iPad. A good example is Snapseed ($4.99, 4.5 stars), which Apple awarded Best iPad App of 2011 in its iTunes App Store Rewind 2011, and Photoshop Touch, from the world's preeminent image software house, Adobe. But when Apple itself puts out a competing photo-editing app, and especially one named for its beloved Mac staple, watch out. iPhoto is a marvel of interface design, and it offers some stunning editing and enhancing tools. It also introduces appealing new ways to share your photos.

At a very affordable $4.99 in the iTunes App Store, iPhoto for iPad (it's actually a "universal" iOS app, meaning it also runs on iPhones) equals Snapseed in price, while Photoshop Touch runs twice that, at $9.99. The latter is something of a different animal, an image-editing powerhouse able to accomplish some of the magic found in desktop Photoshop, like content-aware fill. Snapseed can't match iPhoto for beauty of interface or organizational tools, but it can do more in the way of subtle image editing and embellishing.

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iPhoto's remarkable user interface features multitouch gestures for photo correction, brushes for applying effects onto specific areas of a photo. The app also adds the notion of "Journals" for creating attractive photo collections that can be shared on iCloud. Some nifty organization tools include the ability to identify similar photos with a double-tap, as well as to flag, favorite, or remove images. As with any good photo editor, iPhoto for iPad offers a simple button that takes you right back to your original image view.

Getting Started with iPhoto for iPad
The first thing you need to know is that you have to update your iPad's firmware to iOS 5.1 if you haven't already done so. You'll want to do that anyway, since, among other goodies, the 5.1 update lets you delete Photo Stream photos and use speech input in the keyboard. It also brings a new Camera app, fixes sound in TV shows and movies played on the iPad, and fixes some battery-draining bugs.

Interface
The home screen in iPhoto for iPad shows four tabs along the top: Albums, Photos, Events, and Journals. Tapping into any of these except for Journals, takes you to an individual photo page, and a grid icon displays thumbnails of all the photos in the album along the left (you can switch between one, two, or three columns for this, or move it to the right). As with Snapseed, a question mark button is always present, to show you overlays that explain what all the controls on the screen do, or bring up help. Next to this, an undo arrow lets you backtrack at any time, but the redo option is fairly well hidden: it appears under the Undo icon if you hold it down after an undo. A helpful button at top right lets you quickly view the original image after any amount of edits. A nearby "i" info icon shows camera, size, and date for the present photo (but unfortunately, not the file name).

Once you're in a photo page, you can tap the Edit button at top-right for a slew of options. Along the bottom left, icons access crop and straighten, exposure, color, brushes, and effects. In the middle are your Auto-Enhance (which worked fairly well for me except on difficult exposures), Rotate 90 degrees, Flag, Favorite, and an X for Hide. I would have preferred to see more than one auto option, however, with different options separated out for brightness, color, and so on.

Adjusting brightness and contrast is handled in a way that's innovative for the touch interface. A bar along the bottom represents the image from its darkest to lightest tones, and you can either tap on the picture and swipe up or down to increase or decrease brightness, and right or left to do the same for contrast. The Apple-award-winning Snapseed for iPad uses a similar swiping approach, but both have the drawback of not letting you zoom while in this adjustment mode. Alternatively, you can slide points on the bar at the bottom that correspond to the darkest and brightest points, or to points along the bar that indicate contrast. So moving the leftmost end of the bar can make a photo darker than its darkest value, and the same goes for brightness on the right. It's sort of a histogram without the graph.

The artist's palette icon offers the five adjusters shown along the bottom—saturation, blue skies, greenery, skin tones, and white balance. Just swipe up or down to increase or decrease each adjustment. Occasionally, it would mistake some non-human object for having skin color, but if you place your finger on sky blue, the option changes to darken or brighten the intensity of the sky—a nice trick. You can choose standard white balance settings like sun, clouds, or flash, but you can also set a custom white balance based on a person's skin in the photo or a neutral tone in the photo. One problem I had with this tool, though, was that I couldn't pick up my finger and swipe again to increase or decrease the effect, as I could in Snapseed's similar tools.

Cropping and straightening is also cleverly implemented. You can pinch and zoom within a set crop frame, or resize the frame with or without preserving aspect ratio. But neatest of all is the ability to level by holding the iPad at an angle after tapping on the compass-like control below the photo. This takes advantage of the device's accelerometer. You can also just twist two fingers on the photo (the way most people will probably do it).

Effects, Brushes, Journals

Effects and Brushes
Both the Effects and Brushes tools open up a nifty-looking selection control that corresponds to their function. Brushes sprouts up realistic-looking paint brush images, while Effects, which we'll discuss first, brings up a fan-like set of color swatch sticks. You really have to check out the slideshow to see how slick these tools look.

Effects are in six groups: Warm & Cool, Duotone, Black & White, Vintage, and Artistic. Let's look at the last first, since it sounds interesting. Each effect can be adjusted with some kind of touch gesture. For example, the vignette effect lets you use two fingers to control the center point and extent of the darkening effect, while gradient effects let me swipe one finger up or down to position it. Unfortunately, there's only dark-edge vignetting; fading to white at the edges would be nice to have, too.

The oil paint and water color effects were just on or off, but they did a pretty impressive job nevertheless. I was a little disappointed that the tilt shift only worked exactly horizontally – with Snapseed I could rotate it to choose an in-focus area on an angle. Aura was a cool effect, making a picture look nearly black and white except for the strongest colors. The Vintage options were effective but limited compared to what you get in Snapseed.

Apple's iPhoto for iPad offers local edit brushes for repairing blemishes, red eye, saturation, desaturation, lightening, darkening, sharpening, and softening. These are incredibly simple to use and the blemish and soften tools in particular produced excellent effects, but I had trouble getting the red-eye removal to work. By comparison, iPhoto on the Mac removed red eye automatically in the same test photo. The edge-detection option for the brushes is a big help, and it's something not offered by Snapseed, though Photoshop Touch's brushes do have an edge aware mode.

Journals and Sharing
Unlike the basic iOS Photos app, you can share to Facebook from iPhoto, as well as to Twitter, email, and Flickr. But a couple of new options are also on the table: You can directly "beam" a photo to another iOS device in the vicinity, and you can also build an appealing "Journal." Both options are unique to iPhoto among iOS photo-editing apps. There's a good how-to for iPhoto beaming on our sister site Geek.com. The key to getting beaming to work is that both iOS devices need to be running iPhoto and need to be on the same Wi-Fi network (or in Bluetooth proximity), and you need to enable photo location in iPhoto's settings. After an initial delay, a beamed photo successfully arrived in my iPhone's Camera Roll.

Six designs get you started with the attractive Journal photo collections, with varying light and dark backgrounds and borders. But not only can you use mosaics of photos in your Journals, but you can add text, notes, a calendar, maps and even a weather tile with date and location taken automatically from the photo. You can edit where and how big the photos appear with click-and-dragging and pinch gestures. Journals are a lot of fun to build and enhance, with a half-dozen attractive themes available—Cotton, Border, Denim, Light, Dark, and Mosaic. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple add more in the coming months.

When you're done, you can share them over a Web-based iCloud page, and send email invitations for your contacts to view the Journal on the Web. The online albums are as well-designed and navigable as any you'll see anywhere. Another option is the Journal home page,which lets you share multiple Journals.

Desktop-esque Photo Editing
No one is going to confuse iPhoto for iPad with Adobe Photoshop CS6. It's for consumers who just want to organize, correct, and enhance their photos and then share them in a variety of ways. And I was mightily impressed with the responsiveness of the photo-editing app on both an iPad 2 and a new iPad—I never had to wait for an effect to take place or the image to be updated. iPhoto is certainly one of the most stylish, easy to use, and impressive iPad photo apps around—no surprise given the source. And though it doesn't offer quite as many image enhancements as Snapseed or Photoshop Touch, iPhoto for iPad's brilliantly usable interface, photo organization tools, and innovative Journal feature earn it a PCMag.com Editor's choice.

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About Michael Muchmore

Lead Software Analyst

PC hardware is nice, but it’s not much use without innovative software. I’ve been reviewing software for PCMag since 2008, and I still get a kick out of seeing what's new in video and photo editing software, and how operating systems change over time. I was privileged to byline the cover story of the last print issue of PC Magazine, the Windows 7 review, and I’ve witnessed every Microsoft win and misstep up to the latest Windows 11.

Prior to my current role, I covered software and apps for ExtremeTech, and before that I headed up PCMag’s enterprise software team, but I’m happy to be back in the more accessible realm of consumer software. I’ve attended trade shows of Microsoft, Google, and Apple and written about all of them and their products.

I’m an avid bird photographer and traveler—I’ve been to 40 countries, many with great birds! Because I’m also a classical fan and former performer, I’ve reviewed streaming services that emphasize classical music.

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iPhoto (for iPad)