The Best Camera…

…is the one that’s with you. Or so says commercial photographer Chase Jarvis and his merry band of programmers. The Best Camera is primarily an iPhone app that allows users to enhance and share photos shot with their phone, right on their phone.

Now those of you with an iPhone know that it’s camera is pretty good, but not great. It’s certainly not going to replace your primary camera and I don’t see you shooting your next assignment with it. But it’s always with you, which makes it great for those little moments when inspiration strikes. If you’re anything like me, nothing goes out into the world without at least a little clean up in Photoshop. Small contrast moves, color correction, etc. So the ability to do it right there on the phone certainly justifies the meager price tag for this app. ($3.)

Shot with the iphone, enhanced with Paris filter from "the best camera" app
Shot with the iphone enhanced with Paris filter from the best camera app

The Best Camera includes 14 preset filters that you can apply to any image shot with the iPhone camera. They include basic filters like contrast (increase,) warm, cool, desaturate, light, dark, fade (lowers contrast) and frame (adds a white frame around the image.) There are also four “signature” filters that combine some effects. Jewel increases contrast and color saturation. Paris increases contrast and converts to black and white. Slate reduces saturation and cools the images somewhat. Candy greatly increases saturation and contrast. Sadly these signature filters can’t be fine tuned in the app, but, hey, this isn’t Photoshop.

The app also allows you to share your images directly from the iPhone. You can upload images to Facebook or Twitter, send them in an email or upload them to thebestcamera.com which has a running display of recent images shot and tweaked using the app. The ability to share an enhanced image directly from your phone without having to find your way back to the office, sync your iPhone and share from there is biggest advantage in my book. (Also, if you’re looking for inspiration the stream of images from thebestcamera.com can be very enlightening.) It makes location scouting so much easier.

Overall this little app can be quite useful and a lot of fun. It’s certainly not to be confused with Photoshop for the iPhone but for $3 how can you go wrong.

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