New app: MonoPhix for Mac – Vintage meets technology.

Note: MonoPhix for Mac is 50% off today for launch day and is only 1.99$! Get it now.

We are proud to release our most powerful app ever written for an Apple device, MonoPhix for Mac. The big brother of the popular MonoPhix for iPhone and MonoPhix HD for iPad and the most powerful dedicated black and white photography app for any platform.

MonoPhix is an advanced photo editor, but this one is special, it is built to turn pictures into monochrome masterpieces and to give you full control of the outcome. You can easily control the intensity for each channel and each shade separately and you can add grain, blurs, highly adjustable vignetting and focus, color filters, colors blends and you can even use our experimental selective color feature to give some objects color while leaving the rest of the picture black and white.

Filters
You can apply one of the many presets or effects on your picture. Which allow you to get one click satisfying results which you can later customize using the adjustment panels.

Freestyle editing
MonoPhix has 10 tools to control the overal look of your monochrome picture. You can control the shadow and light tones separately or you can also control the color channels separately. MonoPhix contains 6 color filters to make some colors stand out. You can bring back some color by adjusting the transparency of the monochrome layer, you can add noise, overall blur, increase the contrast, brightness and exposure and posterize your picture.

Vignetting and Focus
With MonoPhix you can control every aspect of a picture’s vignetting. You can control the intensity, the roughness of the edges and shift the vignetting. You can also put a focus on certain objects by using the focus options similar to the vignetting controls.

Colors
You can give a custom color to your picture or control the blending mode which is used to mix the color with your black and white picture.

Selective color
With this experimental feature you can make objects pop out by keeping their color and removing all other colors.

Sharing 
MonoPhix has Phix Cloud integration which allows you to upload your pictures including metadata and a recipe of your changes and filters to our online service to show off to your friends or post on your Twitter or Facebook.

Device requirements
MonoPhix for Mac should run on any Mac built after 2008 running Mac OSX 10.6 or higher. MonoPhix is tested on Mountain Lion and is also optimized for it. The executable is only about 4Mb in size. An internet connection is also required for the sharing options.

Pricing and Availability
MonoPhix for Mac 1.0 is normally priced at $3.99 (USD) and available exclusively through the Mac App Store in the Photography or Graphics categories. Interested writers, reviewers and editors of recognized sites can always request a promo code to check it out for themselves.

Download link : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monophix/id571800015?l=nl&ls=1&mt=12

Screenshots

Update: MonoPhix 3.3 – The most powerful black & white app, fixed.

Our line of Phix apps for iOS has been offline for a few days now because iOS6 caused all of them to crash upon opening an image. (Not our fault, Apple screwed up more things than just the maps app) But we are happy to announce that at least one of them, MonoPhix has returned to the App Store with a fix for the crash and some other improvements.

MonoPhix 3.3 has a slightly altered interface to host more sharing options (coming in the future) and to reduce the amount of clutter in the task bar. We’ve also already added one sharing option, share to Muzy, but it seems to be malfunctioning at the moment. This could be because the sharing API isn’t yet activated at Muzy’s end. And of course the crash has been fixed along with some memory usage tweaks.

We updated and submitted MonoPhix HD a few days ago and MonoPhix Lite for iPhone today. We are also working to bring FlashPhix and FlashPhix lite to version 3.0 with a new interface. This will fix the iOS6 crash on these apps and will bring them back to the App Store as well.

We apologize for the trouble and hope you enjoy MonoPhix 3.3 and all other apps. MonoPhix is available for download at http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/monophix-zwart-wit-filter/id333643515?l=nl&mt=8

iPhix for Mac free for one whole day. Grab it while you can and prepare for the Friday giveaways!

Since we are going to start our TGIF competition very soon and we need as many competitors as possible iPhix for Mac will be free one entire day the 7th of June.
More information about the TGIF twitter competition will appear in a later blogpost, but we can already tell that you can win a 15$ iTunes gift card or comparable price with it each Friday.

In the meanwhile download and enjoy iPhix, show it to your friends and prepare your best pictures and filter picking skills for the competition.

Update: iPhix 1.1 for Mac OS X – Picture filters just got social.

We are pleased to announce the release of iPhix 1.1, an update meant to make the vintage photography and photo adjusting app for Mac OS X more social. This update adds the ability to share not only your pictures, but also a “recipe” of your filters and adjustments, a description of your picture and EXIF and location data. Your friends will be able to view these in the new online Phix.im service. Further improvements include 8 new filters and huge performance boosts.

Sharing with Phix Cloud

While the first version of iPhix had some sharing options to upload your picture, this version has integrated with Phix Cloud to offer the ability to upload and present EXIF data in a pleasant way. However the top improvement over the old sharing system is the ability to upload what you exactly did to get the desired effect on your picture. These “recipes” contain all adjustments and the effects that were applied on your picture. In this way everyone viewing your picture can replicate that exact look on their pictures. Additionally you can track the amount of views your picture got.

New filters

You can immediately try out the new sharing features with 8 new preset filters and effects. “Inky” gives your picture a blueish look as if blue gel was used in front of the flash bulb, “Woody” is a monochrome vintage effect which covers the picture in a gold hue, “Cool” makes the picture a bit more chilly, “Old Comic” imitates the style of old tainted comic books and “Dreamy” imitates the eighties style marriage pictures with a dreamy blur and bright colors. There are  also 3 new effects, “Stereo” which turn your picture into a stereoscopic 3D image, “Glass” which makes your picture look as if taken behind a tiled window and “Heatvision” an infrared effect.

Other minor improvements include a new preview image for the filter gallery, huge performance boosts and some minor bug fixes.

Get it while it’s hot. It’s still available for 3.99$. (Download link)

iPhix 1.1 new filters

iPhix 1.1 Upload screen

iPhix 1.1 Phix Cloud

New App: iPhix for Mac – Create art with every snap. (Filter/adjust/share)

We are proud to release a product that has been in development for half a year now, iPhix for Mac. iPhix is an app that allows you to easily apply a multitude of filters or adjustments to pictures and share them online in a matter of seconds. It’s build to be easy and fun to use for everyone. iPhix provides enough power for professional photographers but can also be used by beginning photographers with almost no editing experience.

Adjustments
There are a huge number of adjustment possibilities present in iPhix. In the adjustments window you can change brightness, exposure, saturation, tone, contrast and apply posterization, cross processing, vignetting, grain, a tilt shift effect or blur to your pictures. All these adjustments can be combined to create magnificent effects. Examples of these are in the preset filters window.

The filters
iPhix currently contains 10 preset filters and one preset filter you can customize and save and 7 so called “solid” filters. This amount will increase with future updates. Preset filters are filters which control the adjustments mentioned earlier and are used to quickly apply vintage or flashy effects on pictures. You can always finetune a preset filter in the adjustments window. With the custom preset filter you can record and save a number of adjustments to create your own preset. The preset filters are called: Vivant, Deep Colors, Aged, Toned, Vintage, Mono, Noir, Expired, Daguerre, Sepia and Custom.

Solid filters are filters which are applied on the image and aren’t adjustable. Some solid filters can be adjusted in intensity though. These filters are much more invasive and transform your picture into a drawing for example. The solid filters are: Bizarre, Dots, Pop, Lithography, Edgy, Cutout and Inverse.

Sharing
Sharing has never been faster with iPhix. Most people have their social networking apps or pages open at any time, so why bother people with a “Log in to Facebook to share this picture”-dialog?
What the iPhix sharing options does is upload your picture to our iPhix Cloud servers instantaneously and provide you with a short link to your picture an online iPhix picture frame. All you have to do is copy the link to TweetDeck, Twitter, Facebook, Mail or anywhere you want.

Saving
When opening a picture for adjusting you expect everything to stay the same, except for the things you change. Therefore iPhix remembers your EXIF data and saves it along with your adjusted image. Your lens, aperture, flash settings, camera type, … all will be saved. iPhix also cuts the process of selecting a save filetype for you, all files are saved in the same filetype as the one they were opened in. Additionally it restores corrupted image orientations to ensure that your picture is always the right way up.

Device requirements
iPhix for Mac should run on any Mac built after 2008 running Mac OSX 10.6 or Mac OSX 10.7. iPhix is tested on Lion and is also optimized for it. The executable is only about 12Mb in size. An internet connection is also required for the sharing options.

Pricing and Availability
iPhix 1.0 is currently $3.99 (USD) and available exclusively through the Mac App Store in the Photography or Productivity categories. Interested writers, reviewers and editors of recognized sites can always request a promo code to check it out for themselves.

Download link : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iphix/id513779082?l=nl&ls=1&mt=12

Screenshots 

The iPhix aperture logo, the names "iPhix" and "iPhix Cloud" are property of Phix Software.

Black Friday sale on all iOS apps. 100% off MonoPhix, MonoPhix HD, FlashPhix, Lingi, iDuelpro!

All our apps are currently free for Black Friday, so enjoy. The sale will automatically end November 26th.

Here’s a list of all apps with download links:

Photography Apps

• MonoPhix (0.99$->0$) – The most powerful black & white app out there.
• MonoPhix HD (1.99$ -> 0$) - The most powerful black & white app out there. (for iPad)
• FlashPhix (0.99$ -> 0$) – Cross processing, automatic correction and lighting control in one easy app.

(There’s one app missing here, “iPhix” but the app has to be updated pretty badly and I highly discourage anyone downloading it)

Games and gaming aids:

• Lingi (0.99$->0$) – A language game for young and old to easily learn Dutch, French or English.
• iDuelpro (0.99$->0$) – The most popular Yu-gi-oh! TCG scorekeeper in the world.

So go and get your future favorite app for free while you can!

Steve Jobs. 1955 – 2011.

I’m writing this because someone I greatly admire passed away this week. I wanted to write this earlier but ironically my MacBook’s charger broke down that day. To those few unfamiliar with him, Steve Jobs was one of the founders of Apple Inc. The company which brought you your music player and many things which start with an “i” to say it quite uncivil.

As I see it, Steve was one out of the same league as Antoni Gaudi, Salvador Dali, Leonardo da Vinci and Jimi Hendrix. Often misunderstood but visionary. Just like them he saw things no ordinary man saw. As a visionary CEO it’s hard to compare him to other tech CEO’s as he was unique. There is not a single executive in the current IT landscape which excels in the same way Steve excelled, not even Larry Ellison. The closest you can get to a man of relative capabilities is probably Howard Hughes. To cast it into his own words. You can disagree with Jobs and these other people in many ways but you can’t ignore them, because they changed the world. They pushed the human race forward.

As a person I can’t really judge Steve. And it makes me feel sad about writing this as in fact I’m writing this as a tribute to someone who I can only evaluate for his work. From what I know he was a perfectionist often persistent which is in fact not a bad feature. That’s all I know. I wished I knew more but I don’t and I think it’s to his family and friends to judge him as a person. There’s no one else in this world but them who is entitled to an opinion about him as a person and so I look in disgust about the coming screams from people who disliked him for no apparent reason but never knew him.

So I have only a few remaining words for some people who will probably never read this.

To his relatives and friends I can give but shallow comfort, he is not alone wherever he is. A lot of great people have suffered the same fate and it rests us all. So it’s hard, but you can look at all his great accomplishments and smile cause he lives on in each of his unbridled ideas.

To Tim Cook. Take good care of Apple. It’s impossible to replace Steve and it’s hardly possible to find a suitable successor in this world. But try to carry on what Steve started and don’t take wild decisions unless you support them 100%. Disney survived the passing of Walt Disney and Apple will most certainly survive the passing of Steve as it’s in the hands of an excellent team.

To Steve: I don’t believe in life after death, but in times likes these I hope it exists. So Steve, wherever you are I hope you’re in peace and maybe just maybe we can meet in a next life.

Update: MonoPhix – Vintage Meets Technology v3.2

Yet another MonoPhix update has hit the App Store. This time it’s quite a major update for people who had issues with the vignetting and of course also for people who like some extra features.

The new update basically has 3 new features.

Completely rebuilt vignetting system

We were tired of constantly having to fix vignetting issues and patching stuff so we threw out the old vignetting engine and equipped MonoPhix 3.2 with a new one. Because the vignetting glitch in version 3.0 and 3.1 is actually caused by an iOS quirk it’s very hard to get rid of the glitch completely, but this update comes pretty close. So from now on vignetting should work flawlessly on all standard format pictures and on many cropped pictures or those generated by apps. This also cleared the need for the correction slider introduced in version 3.1. The general vignetting update also makes way for more advanced vignetting effects and the ability to control the vignetting with multiple parameters (eg. radius, hardness, shape, …).

In-app camera access

Now you can shoot pictures directly from within MonoPhix. When we questioned some users this wasn’t directly a killer feature, but apparently people have been switching apps from MonoPhix to others because they could shoot pictures directly from within the app. So now this issue is gone as well and you can easily tap the camera button in the upper left corner, shoot a picture and the default settings will automatically be applied to it.

Gestures

Last but not least is the addition of gestures to swipe between tools. Now for those who question the direction of the swipe, if you swipe to the right the tooltab to the right will open, if you swipe to the left the tooltab on the left will open. See the bottom toolbar as an indicator. There might be an option added to the settings to change this in future versions. All and all, this will be a great way to help you speed up your editing.

This isn’t a particularly bulky update but it adds some important features and hopefully fixes the vignetting woes for many users.

You can download MonoPhix 3.2 here or just press the update button in the App Store.

Update: MonoPhix 3.1.1 – Fixes glitch, improves vignetting and adds one new feature.

About a week ago we released MonoPhix 3.1, but as every major update MonoPhix 3.1 had a few things that needed to be resolved. With MonoPhix 3.1.1 these issues have been washed away and we took the courtesy to add a user requested feature.

The opening screen glitch, the biggest reason to get this update pushed out is now resolved.

The vignetting system now has 2 parameters to control the vignetting and these are controlled by one slider. This might seem as quite a pointless change, but the vignetting system is now controlled in an exponential manner. By default it’s much lighter and when you slide the slider tot the far right, the strength and radius parameters are maxed out to give an even stronger vignetting effect. In MonoPhix 3.2 the sliders will be separated to give even more control.

Together with the changes to the intensity of the vignetting, a lot of issues which caused the venetian blind effect on some resolutions were fixed.

At user request we also added the ability to underexpose pictures or fix overexposed pictures. This functionality was added to the Exposure slider in the “processing”-tab.

So version 3.1.1 is a worthy update to version 3.1 and solidifies the features of this major version even adding a new one.

You can find it in the App Store. -> http://hur.lu/ktfs

Update: MonoPhix – Vintage Meets Technology v3.1

NOTE: The newest update contains a bug caused by an incorrect project setting which causes the opening screen to look all buggy and  glitchy. This issue will be fixed ASAP in a 3.1.1 update. It’s sad that these things always happen and simply cannot be caught during testing but they are a result of Apple’s lack of documentation regarding design for Retina Displays. The fix will be submitted tomorrow and will hopefully fix this annoying problem. I apologize sincerely for the mistake.

Today we are pleased to announce the newest version of the most feature rich black and white photo editor for iPhone, MonoPhix. Version 3.1 brings with it a number of fixes for annoying issues as well as stability and performance improvements but also a completely new often requested feature.

Filters

From now on you’ll be able to select a filter for your monochrome conversions. The preset filters are:
-”-” (default)
-Red
-Green
-Blue
-Cyan
-Magenta
-Yellow

Each filter will act like a filter on a camera and filter out light in that specific color. This can be used to enhance the intensity of grass or to accentuate the sky. All these preset filters are available with one tap from within the “Adjust” tab.

Example of the new filter function with the red filter enabled.

 Vignetting improvements

Something which has been bothering users was the quirk in the preview when vignetting was enabled which caused the vignetting to look like venetian blinds. In version 3.1 this is resolved further by adding a few new common picture resolutions to the exception list. If this glitch would still occur users are now able to adjust the preview offset by themselves with an extra slider in the vignetting tab. The vignetting is now also less intense by default and has a higher range.

The new vignetting tab in MonoPhix 3.1

Other fixes

Along with these major improvements came some minor fixes which you will probably not even notice. These include added reliability on iOS 4.3 and up and small performance improvements which speed up the processing slightly. Also there’s now a tooltip at the top of each tab when you next open MonoPhix which will display instructions on hiding a tab overlay and displaying the image unobstructed. These will disappear automatically when the user uses this feature for the first time.

Release cycle changes

We can also announce that MonoPhix will get a shorter release cycle which brings updates and improvements at a faster pace. We are already outlining the the featureset of MonoPhix 3.2 which will bring some more interesting features. MonoPhix normally gets only one major update a year and a few small bug fixing releases but from now one this will change to one major update a year (with UI changes) and about 4 significant minor updates which add extra features and improve existing ones.

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MonoPhix 3.1 is now available in the iTunes App Store and can be downloaded here.

Here’s the full feature list as seen in the App Store for reference:

• Color filters for Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and of course default (average blending) easily accessible with one tap
• Added a small tooltip to show people how they can hide the tool overlay (this will disappear automatically after being used)
• Vignetting is now lighter by default and has a higher range
• A slider was added to the vignetting tab to allow users to correct the vignetting on the preview in case of glitches
• Fixed vignetting preview glitch on some landscape images (1936×2691)
• Fixed a few minor issues to improve reliability on iOS 4.3 and up
• Small performance adjustments to make the filters run more smoothly