The Ilford filter applied to an image shot with the widescreen ratio and black and white film options applied.Īll in all, Vignette proved to be a very capable app on my Galaxy SIII, and was the one app I wished I had on my iPhone. The Ilford filter in a widescreen crop also produced a very pleasing image of the Golden Gate bridge. I particularly liked the Velvia filter, with its super-saturated blues and greens, and the Action Movie filter (found in the “Cinematic” category), which produces a very “crunchy” image. Kudos to Vignette for rendering out full-resolution images with superb detail and color. This might seem like a small thing, but I tested way too many apps that turned my images into unusable, lo-res blobs. The filters themselves are very well-rendered and actually add to your images. I can then save that as a preset to use later. The granular level with which you can adjust these various filters is remarkable if I liked, say, the Velvia filter, but wanted a bit more film grain and needed to dial back the intensity of the colors, that’s doable. Options-wise, Vignette is solidly in the “powerful” category.
The nice thing about Vignette is that it stores the original, untreated image in a directory called “100VORIG” in your phone’s Gallery app, so you can go back to an image and run it through a number of permutations. You can also pick a couple of frame styles, like Instant Frame or a 35mm film strip.
You can also adjust the crop of the image and go from square to 16:9 widescreen, 4:3, 21:9 and a handful of others. You can adjust the intensity of the filter, the amount of vignetting you want applied and add film grain or a colored filter to the image, for example. Each filter can be further customized with a very thorough list of options. Pick one, try it and if it works for you, save it as a preset and move on.īut it doesn’t stop there. You could, if you wanted, stop right there.
From basic filters that film shooters will recognize, like Velvia, Portra and Ilford, to categories like Toy Camera, Cinematic and Lens Effects, each with a series of effects of their own. You start by picking a Filter, and there’s a pretty extensive list to choose from here. Power users will quickly swipe past this screen, however, and start to build their own presets, much like Hipstamatic encourages you to do on the iPhone. There’s a Holga-style preset that outputs a square black-and-white print, as well as a Polaroid preset that’s comprised of the app’s SX-70 filter with an Instant Classic frame. The app provides a number of pre-saved combinations of effects and customizations to get you started, and they are enough to keep you amused at first. Once you dig under the surface, however, the richness of the options menu quickly reveals itself, and the power of the app shines through. Options are familiar, but without the visual UI.