eXtensions: AMITIAE

AMITIAE - Saturday 20 April 2013

XProcess: a Cross Processing app for the iPhone

By Graham K. Rogers

Xprocess

There are so many apps focused on photography and image manipulation, yet more appearing weekly. An app that caught my eye recently was ClipCrop. When I downloaded it, I found that the developer was responsible for a number of other photo apps. I downloaded one of these - XProcess - further to gauge the work of developer Yusuke Horio.

After my look at ClipCrop, I found that Yusuke Horio (or youthhr) had developed 10 other apps. Some are free, but I started a wider look at this developer with the $0.99 app, XProcess (or Cross Process). This describes a technique of producing specialised image output from film photography: "the deliberate processing of photographic film in a chemical solution intended for a different type of film" (Wikipedia).

The recent resurgence of Lomography saw many images produced from the cameras newly available and a number of apps (search with "Lomo" in the iTunes App Store) are available that produce such effects. XProcess takes the approach of using pre-set filters that have slider-type adjustments so that users can fine-tune the output.

XProcess

The tidy opening screen of XProcess has three icons available to users at the bottom: a gear wheel for settings, a camera icon for image imports, and a speech balloon for sharing. When this is first pressed, there is a warning that the user must first take, or select a photo.

Settings allows the user to make a number of changes to the way the App works: Shake to Shuffle (On/Off), Edit Mode that allows the user to move and scale an image selected; and Camera, which will access the camera automatically when the app is opened.
Also in Settings are links to other apps: 6 are shown, with two marked as free. Pressing any of those listed, opens the relevant page in the App Store. Below the Other Apps section is a link to App store reviews of XProcess (none were available). At the bottom of the Settings screen the version number (1.3.0) was shown.
The Camera icon allows the user to choose an image from the Photo Albums when pressed, or to take a photo. When any image (photograph or album selection) is selected, it is displayed on screen with some 27 cross-process filters below. Simply scrolling through the filters gives a range of effects that are applied to the current image when pressed.
That would be enough for many apps, but XProcess does not stop there. Just to the right of the filter displays is a wrench (spanner) icon. Accessing Tools allows the user to adjust each image further with a series of sliders.

Depending on the specific filter, there may be 2, 3 or 4 sets of these sliders. Examples may be Process 1 (Contrast, Brightness, Saturation), Layer 1 (Red, Green, Blue, with the layer color displayed in a small panel) and Vignette (Darkness, Width). In the Vignette panel there was also a Color box, but I was unable to change this initially as the sliders were hidden. The panel must be moved up, then the Vignette color may be adjusted. In later examination I found that other panels (e.g. Process) also had these color changing sliders.

When any slider is used a small Reset button appears near the top of the image. This returns the filter to its original settings. If this is not done, the next time an image is opened in that filter, it will be displayed in the new settings. The range of effects that is possible with the combination of sliders and filters is immense (I do not want to use the overworked, "infinite"). Some may wish to retain the new settings for a particular effect that can then be repeated.

Export

When an image is edited, at the top of the screen is a button marked Save. This brings up a useful panel in which a selection of 5 image sizes are available, from Small (1100 x 820) up to Actual Size (3264 x 2448). When one of the buttons is pressed, a progress bar appears on the screen as the image is saved.

At the bottom of the screen, to the right is a share button (the Speech bubble icon) that offers three options when pressed: email, Facebook and Twitter. When email is used, the same size panel appears with 5 options for the image. Image sizes will depend on the source: those from the library will be slightly smaller than a photograph taken with the iPhone camera.

Comments

There are two ways a user may produce output from this inexpensive app: "quick and dirty", or with careful application of graded effects. An image may be imported, a filter applied and then exported in a few seconds, which may satisfy many users who intend their output for social networking sites. By adjusting the sliders a far more delicate and unique output is easily within the reach of any user.

It has not been optimized for the iPad so when installed on that device displays in the x1 and x2 formats with a resultant loss of sharpness when used in the larger of the two modes: nothing unexpected there.

As the image output size on the iPhone is not restricted and depends on input, the final result can keep a lot of potential users happy. XProcess is not by any means a difficult app to use, but it has enough sophistication at its $0.99 price to please most who enjoy working with such image editing apps.