Image Tricks: Simple Photo Effects

Whether it be profile pictures on Facebook, or the family snaps for your great aunt, we are saturated by photographs and the means to take them. With applications like PhotoBooth on our macs, we have become an increasingly vein bunch of computer users who always click that digital shutter. With that comes the urge to add simple effects that amuse us or to make our pictures appear more professional. We are constantly applying filters in PhotoBooth that amusingly distort our faces, place us on a roller-coaster or make us appear like something out of a film noir. So any app that manipulates photographs must be a winner to any modern computer user.

Image Tricks let’s you import your photographs to tweak them in any way you wish from a set of filters and other tools. These filters include image adjustment, such as hue/saturation and distortion, as well as the ability to crop your image to a specified shape mask, including the apple logo. For any apple fan boy, that is a must for profile pictures. There is no limit to the number of effects that can be applied to any image, but as a down side, the filters can not be adjusted once applied. The supported formats for this app meet most of the imaging standards in modern computing, and it can export to many formats including JPEG and PNG. It also has built in iPhoto support, which can make integration of applying effects to your picture library a breeze.

This application also has the ability to generate customizable images, such as patterns or stylistic art suitable for many applications including web design and backgrounds. Each generator has it’s own set of tools to make the pattern your own, providing many possibilities for the user.

These Mac OSX core image based toolsets lie under the hood of a very clean, user friendly interface that supports Open GL acceleration, running at a native speed on both the PPC architecture and intel chipsets.

This app is available in two versions, a pro and a free version and is available exclusively for Mac OSX. The major difference between the two versions lies in the number of presets; while the standard version contains 63 presets, the pro version has 72, along side 12 image generators in the standard, compared to the 19 in the Pro. You can upgrade the free version at any time for $14.95, but with the difference being so arguably minimal, justification for the purchase can be difficult. As a free app, this is perfect for adding that extra touch to your images.

I am not suggesting this app is suitable for sophisticated graphic design, but to add quick effects to your images, this app cannot be beaten. WIth other tools including the ability to crop images, this app is extremely useful for anyone who takes advantage of the abundance and availability of still images today. I recommend heading over to the website, and giving it a try for yourself.