I’ve had slightly more time on my hands the past few days, and have become obsessed with camera/photo/filter apps for my HTC Evo Shift 4G. Overall I’ve been pretty disappointed with how the resolution of each image gets thrown out the window as the phone applies the filter to the images. The best app that I’ve found, the one that retains the most information from the original file, is Retro Camera from Urbian. Their slogan is “It’s never too soon to be nostalgic.” I just love that. Above (top) is one of the images taken with my phone via Retro Camera. The end files are the highest resolution out of the several apps that I’ve tried, 1700x1700. Unfortunately you’re stuck shooting square pictures, and cannot import and process pictures you’ve taken outside the app. But this is not a review of smartphone camera apps.
As I said I’ve been a little bit obsessed with it all, and I’ve found myself downloading Photoshop actions that replicate the look of Instagram, etc. The biggest bonus is that you retain the resolution of the camera that shot the image, but with that cool filter look. The one I’m most impressed with is Polaroid Generator (see an example above, bottom).
Not sure why, but this desire to play around with images and make them look Polaroid-y really only deals with pictures of my son. I am sitting on several rolls of Tri-X that I’ll probably get developed in the next few weeks. But will I be running those scans through a batch of Photoshop actions? Absolutely not. I do know this much, though: this is the first year that my go-to camera has not had film in it.
