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.

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.

MonoPhix HD for iPad submitted to App Store

Today, after a long silent period for product releases we finally released our first iPad app. MonoPhix HD is the bigger brother of our black & white picture processing tool MonoPhix for iPhone.

The new MonoPhix HD is fully adapted to the iPad’s screen and features a whole busload of improvements. Only one concept remains intact from the iPhone version and that are the two sliders, one to intensify the bright areas of a picture and one to intensify the shadow areas.

Another features taken from the original version is the ability to recolor your black & white image, in the iPhone version you can generate sepia and antique versions in addition to the default black & white. In MonoPHix HD you can select whatever color you want by using a pop-up box with 3 sliders to set the RGB values of the desired color.

Other interesting new features include the ability to open tremendously huge pictures. In tradition to our iPhone apps, we try to enable people to edit their pictures at full resolution as good as possible without straining the system too much and although the iPad just slightly more powerful than an iPhone 3Gs, we managed to make MonoPhix HD support huge pictures and operate faster and more reliable than his iPhone colleague.

This also brings a few more possibilities into the mix, because we saved on performance we were able to add more powerful filtering features. Therefore MonoPhix HD also supports the ability to enhance the exposure to create a very worn out B&W look and enables you to set an alpha for the B&W filter, which means that you can choose to merge it with your previous image to obtain very pleasing results.

Perhaps the most important feature for some will be the ability to set adjustable vignetting for your monochrome pictures. You can choose between 2 types of vignetting, to make the edge of your image either lighter or to burn it and make it darker. The intensity of your vignetting can be completely controlled with the slider.

MonoPhix HD “should be” available next week in an App Store near you and will cost 1.99$ or the equivalent in other currency. Another blogpost will follow as it becomes available.

To end with you can find a gallery of screenshots in the bottom of this article.

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GrayPhix & MonoPhix for iPhone free for acquaintance offer!

Since Apple changed its App Store policy, only front-paging “new” Applications instead of new and updated ones, we can no longer benefit from updates, so we are going to start a new tradition of acquaintance offers. In this way people can get acquainted with new or less popular apps, which are still pretty decent.

The acquaintance offers this time are MonoPhix and GrayPhix. Here a small summary :

-MonoPhix v1.1 :
Category : Photography
Normal Price : 0.99$ (Now Free!)
Description :
With MonoPhix you can create Monochrome images from your pictures with one touch. Even advanced image editing apps on your mac/pc require multiple filters and adjustments to create these high depth and high quality monochrome images.
Download Link

-GrayPhix v1.3 :
Category : Photography
Normal Price : 0.99$ (Now Free!)
Description :
GrayPhix is the most impressive grayscaling app available for iPhone and iPod Touch and is optimized to handle even the largest images directly on your iPhone.You will even be able to simulate camera flash for your grayscale images taken in a dark or twilight environment.
Download Link

Get them while they’re still hot!

36-image converter video tutorial for people who fail to convert

I’ve been getting a lot of complaints lately <sarcasm>always from nice people who don’t insult me or anything</sarcasm> that 36-image converter is hard to work with and that they can’t find any info on how to convert an image or even open one. So I created a tutorial on how to open images in 36-image converter and convert them. In the tutorial we’re going to convert a DNG raw camera image to PNG in 2 minutes.

A few remarks :
-The version used in the video is a development version of 36-image converter 4.7 Beta which hasn’t been released yet. So you won’t be able to filter filetypes in the open-dialog.
-In versions older than the newest alpha version of 36-image converter 4.7 you won’t be able to open and convert DNG or other raw filetypes. You can download 36-image converter 4.7 here>
-My voice is no opera baritone so I still suggest reading the help file instead of listen to me for 2 whole minutes

I hope everything is clear now and that I don’t have to hear another. “It can’t convert images, this is stupid!” in my whole life.

iPhix 1.2 for iPhone released, new icon, sliders, better filters,…

The newest version of our iPhix image editor for iPhone is released to the iTunes Store. This newest version is one of the last versions of a resizing and cropping iPhix, the next version (2.0) will support full resolution images.

The changes include :
-New icon
-Added Brighten/Darken Filter (comparable to flash-simulator apps)
-Added ability to adjust the color gamma
-Added slider to control “Egalize”-filter
-Added Ability to select more than one filter
-Added ability to remove filters
-Added Solarize filter
-Improved reliability
-New Help file

Screenshot iPhix

iPhix to support full resolution images in iPhix 2.0

We are currently developing the newest version of our image editor for the iPhone iPhix. The biggest issue was that it didn’t support full resolution pictures, everything was resized. And since many people think they are professional photographers operating the iPhone’s cam, this was absolutely necessary. An iPhone image editor must support 1.600×1.200 pixels images or it is useless apparently. So now iPhix will trade the advanced filter system, where you can select and test images before applying, for the ability to edit images at full resolution.

We weren’t able to maintain the advanced filter manager together with full resolution images since the filter system stored cache copies of the image in the memory and since there is only 16Mb of video memory available this was an issue. So we are going to do what all other image editors do in the App Store, make a crappy app with full resolution instead of an advanced photo editor which is suitable for a smartphone.

From this evolution in version 2.0 we will continue development to bring back a few of the lost features. Avoiding memory issues.

iPhix 1.1 released to the iTunes App Store

v1.1 of the iPhone/iPod Touch image editor iPhix has been approved to the iTunes App Store today. This update essentially fixes a whole bunch of issues people were experiencing. The added functionality is minimal, but the update is essential to clear out all child diseases.

iPhix 1.1 has the following changes to version 1.0 :
-Improved engine to prevent crashes and fix random resets
-Masks are now improved to fit the image’s dimensions better
-Recolored background to match the rest of the interface
-New mysterious solarwind filter (solarW)
-Add confirmation messages for save
-Added save warning to “Web” and “Help”
-Fixed bugs with which crashed the application on use of multiple masks

So iPhix 1.1 is a lot more stable to work with. Of course v1.2 is already on its way and submitted to the App Store.

Now we are just waiting for Apple to place iPhix in the top of the new releases listing, where it belongs as it has a release date set to September the 4th but is hanging out between apps who were updated the 24th of August.

You can still download iPhix here>

36-image converter downloaded 100.000 times on CNET

We know that all together from various sources 36-image converter is downloaded about 600.000 times, but we only take one result as official and untampered with measuring tool, CNET. And this night, the 100.000th download of 36-image converter was confirmed.

36-image converter is around since februari 2006 and has been listed on CNET since July 2006, it took off quite fast quickly bringing it to 20.000 downloads and to one of our most downloaded applications. Later in 2007 we started seeing the potential of 36-image converter and we started building other more advanced tools and version, thus even increasing the amount of downloads even more. In 2008 came 36-image converter 4.4 “Ninja” and this has put us on the map as the most popular real image converter and one of the top 20 most popular image editing tools in the world. And today, we have 100.000 official downloads.

I can only say one more thing : Bring in the 1.000.000!

iPhix 1.2 for iPhone finished and Apple still reviewing v1.1

Last Friday we finished v1.1 of our iPhone photo editor iPhix, adding some new filters and fixing a whole lot of bugs. With that solid base we created a new folder and started messing around with some filters, eventually trying out the first idea a reviewer delivered us. One thing led to another and today we have finished iPhix 1.2.

iPhix 1.2 brings a new icon which actually looks good, adds a brighten/darken filter which can be compared to many flash apps which are most of the time more expensive than iPhix. But well how much an application is downloaded doesn’t depend on quality anyway, it’s just what trick you use to stay at the top of the listing that does it. But anyway, the brighten or darken function works with a slider control with the far left being “dark as the night” and the far right being “heavily backlighted picture of the sun”. Another new filter-function is the function to control the RGB values or Gamma of an image with 3 slider controls, one for red, one for green and one for blue.

You can now also remove filters from an image as long as they weren’t saved and apply more than one filter to an image by saving the filter to the image first with a simple function. The slider control was also applied to the egalise function, in which you can now specify an amount of colors the picture can have. 1 more filter was added called “Solarise”, bringing the total amount of filters to 18.

A final improvement comes with slightly improved code reliability and a new icon, which according to some who have beheld it, looks amazing.

iPhix 1.2 was planned for late September but will be submitted for approval whenever Apple plans on approving v1.1. So the release date will probably be somewhere mid-September.

iPhix Gamma Function

iPhix Brightness in Action