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

Promo: MonoPhix, MonoPhix HD free, iPhix for Mac -50%.

NOTE: This promo is over but all apps are still available at their normal prices.

To apologize for the downtime our apps suffered as a result of the iOS 6 release we are putting up a temporary promo. At the moment we’re only going to make it last a day, but if enough people tweet about and share it we might think of making the promo last a day longer.

• MonoPhix for iPhone is now free. You save 0.99$.
  -MonoPhix for iPhone turns your pictures into stunning black and white masterpieces. It provides the most customizable result of any app.
• MonoPhix HD for iPad is now free. You save 1.99$.
  -MonoPhix for iPad is the big brother of MonoPhix for iPhone, it has more features and is optimized for the iPad’s larger screen.
• iPhix for Mac is now 1.99$. You save 2.00$.
  -iPhix for Mac is an app which allows you to edit pictures, apply filters and create custom filters. You can also upload pictures and filters to a social network.

Update: MonoPhix HD 1.2.1 and MonoPhix Lite 3.1, maintenance updates.

Many photo apps have been hit by an iOS6 flaw causing them to crash and malfunction and this was no different for MonoPhix, MonoPhix HD for iPad and MonoPhix Lite for iPhone. The first one already received an update to fix the crashes, but MonoPhix HD and MonoPhix Lite were still offline. With these two updates the entire line of Phix apps returns to the app store and the existing userbase will have a working app once again.

The MonoPhix HD update only fixes the crash issue and MonoPhix Lite received a fix for the crash and a fix for a bug affecting the image picker.

You can download MonoPhix HD 1.2.1 here and MonoPhix Lite 3.1 here.

Official launch: Phix – Photo and filter sharing service.

Today we are pleased to announce the official launch of our Phix photo and filter sharing service. Phix has been online for quite a bit longer and iPhix for Mac users could enjoy it during that time, but today we feel it’s mature enough to launch officially. Especially since the redesigned homepage went online yesterday. At the moment only two apps support Phix, iPhix for Mac and MonoPhix HD for iPad, but the iPhone version of MonoPhix and others will follow very soon. It’s not out of beta yet, but that’s just because we are still improving the service every day.

What does Phix do that other photo sharing apps don’t?

Phix is not only a photo sharing app, but also allows people to share their complete history of changes they made to the original opened image in a “recipe”. In this way you can show people how you got the result you uploaded and how they can get the same result on their pictures. The online photo viewer automatically detects which app is used and shows the right recipe for your picture. Additionally you can also decide to display EXIF and location data. (Only supported by some apps) But the biggest strength of Phix is that it allows you to upload images without hassle and that you don’t need log in information and that it doesn’t ask for Twitter or Facebook credentials. It just “Share” > Add description > “Upload”. Phix will then return a short link to share back to the app.

How will people find the picture I upload to Phix?

Very simple, you get a shortlink to the viewer page of your picture which you can share on various social networks like Twitter or Facebook. Phix keeps track of all views your picture has and displays them at the bottom of the info box. Additionally, if your picture is nice or artistic enough it can be featured on the homepage mosaic where people can click on your picture and are redirected to the viewer page.

What improvements will be made in the future?

In the future people will be able to leave comments on your pictures and you will be able to create an account on the site where you can add the apps you are sharing pictures from. You will also be able to download recipes straight to your apps and they will automatically be applied. Of course there will also be a greater number of apps you can use to upload pictures.

If you want to try Phix for yourself, head over to the homepage and download one of the supported apps or you can check what other people uploaded.

Brand new app: Some samples

For all people who thought that we had died or abandoned development, think again. We’re very much alive and within a few weeks of unleashing a new app onto the world.

That’s about all I can say for now, but I wanted to throw in a teaser in the form of some sample shots.

Although it are black and white shots, the app isn’t a monochrome app. I just chose that certain filter because we all like MonoPhix, don’t we? Also these images never touched an iOS device.

Mobile Photo Awards, final days to submit!

As you might have read on Twitter or Facebook or from the blog’s sidebar, MonoPhix is one of the apps participating in the Mobile Photo Awards. This basically means that you can edit (or shoot) a picture with MonoPhix or a combination of MonoPhix and other apps and submit it to enter the competition. By submitting you get the chance to win amazing prizes and eventually see your pictures featured in an exposition. Of course we would be very honored and proud if a great iPhoneographer could win with a picture edited with MonoPhix. The entry fee is only 20$ for 3 images or 30$ for 5.

The deadline to enter is 30 November, so only 3 days left.

Enter now or go to the MonoPhix page!

Good luck to everyone participating!

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 – 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

App update: MonoPhix 3 – Vintage meets technology, again. [MAJOR]

NOTE: If you are using iOS 3.1.3 or lower you might want to wait a week until version 3.0.2 is out, this version fixes crashes on iOS 3.1.x devices and adds support for iOS 3.0 devices.

It’s been about a year since MonoPhix 2 was released. It was at that time called the black & white app with the best results around. In a year many things changed, a lot of competition with more feature rich apps got out of nowhere and things became silent around MonoPhix. But we weren’t partying or resting, in fact we spent an entire year developing great new features, filters and tried a lot of different angles to find the most suitable interface for our flagship app. The first results came in MonoPhix HD and now fans of the iPhone version can also rejoice. We present to you, the biggest app update in our entire history: MonoPhix 3.

MonoPhix 3 was built with one goal, to be the best Black & White app in the app store. If we succeeded is up to the user, but we certainly did our best. MonoPhix 3 has over 30 new features and changes and a completely redesigned UI optimized to provide easy access to all those tools.

What’s different?

The user interface

MonoPhix 3 has a completely redesigned dark wood UI as mentioned before. People who also use the iPad version will be very familiar with this interface as it’s based on the MonoPhix HD UI. Here’s an example of what you get when you open MonoPhix. You are welcomed by the social note which provides access to our twitter and facebook pages. The dock has been replaced by a simple brown bar which gives access to the controls to open and save your pictures.

The tonal sliders and the new MonoCore 3 filter

The tonal sliders which give users the ability to enhance the contrast of their monochrome picture have been there for a while and now they are even more powerful. Together with the new enhanced monochrome filter they allow for very high contrast while remaining details and quality.

Processing options

The MonoPhix 3 processing options

A lot of features are gathered under the processing tab. It allows you to blow out exposure, generate grain, posterize the image and invert the colors. But the most interesting feature is the alpha slider. It allows you to set the transparency for the monochrome layer and makes MonoPhix less of a monochrome app by allowing users to create desaturated high contrast vintage pics.

Vignetting

Vignetting

We believe that MonoPhix 3 has some of the most advanced vignetting options of any iPhone app. It allows with one slider which takes even Photoshop several actions, clicks and menus further. MonoPhix supports burned and bleached vignetting and you can adjust the radius and strength of the vignet to your specific needs.

Coloring

Coloring

MonoPhix 2 allowed coloring your monochrome pics to eg. Sepia or Antique. With MonoPhix 3 we took this to a whole new level. Now you can recolor the duotone to whatever you like with the 3 RGB sliders.

High resolution preview

Preview mode

The biggest complaint about MonoPhix 2 was that the previews were just too small. Complaints are there to be fixed, so now MonoPhix 3 provides users with an almost full screen preview. People even have the ability to hide the controls by double tapping any menu item or just tapping the active menu item. Now you can review your changes in detail before saving.

The Settings

Settings

For the first time in its history MonoPhix also contains a settings panel and a help file. The settings panel allows you to bring back the old more grainy MonoCore 2 filter under the “Fast film” tab. It allows people with an iPhone 4 or 4g iPod Touch to enable a huge high quality preview for the Retina Display and allows some other UI options to be set.

MonoPhix 3 is still available for 0.99$ in the App Store and even comes as a free update to the 3.000 existing users. But we might raise the price later, so we can give decent discounts on Black Friday and during the holidays.

We can’t wait to see some great MonoPhix edits appear on the web!

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App Update: MonoPhix HD 1.1 – Vintage meets technology.

Some users have noticed performance issues in our brand new MonoPhix HD for iPad and indeed it can or better said “could” be slow in updating the preview after changing a value sometimes. So we wanted to push a new version out as fast as possible to fix these performance issues along with some bugs. So to get these fixed as fast as possible, we couldn’t quite materialize all new features we promised in an earlier blogpost. But I also realize that updating an app and wasting bandwidth just to get an app to work as it should isn’t the most thankful thing to do, so we’ve added some new features as well which we’re quite proud of. As a result of playing around we ended up with 15 improvements and new features.

First I’m going to point out what we did to the performance. MonoPhix HD is now 70% faster when previewing your changes. We did this partially by disabling the processing options as long as you didn’t activate them. So you don’t have to wait anymore for changes you didn’t make. The other performance gain comes from downsizing the preview with 100×100 pixels to 500×500 pixels by default. This is still acceptable and can now be changed to either 450 for very high performance, 500, 550 or back to the old 600 in the new settings panel.

Now let’s discuss the new features. We’ve added a noise generator, as promised. The result of this is quite promising, it brings much more texture to your monochromes and adds to the vintage look which MonoPhix is famous for. In the same processing panel (which used to be called “exposure & alpha”) you can now find another slider to quantize or better said posterize you picture. This will reduce the colors from 255 all the way to 1 and everything in between to provide a comic book or drawing look to your monochromes. The final feature is a switch to invert the colors of your picture, like a negative.

Perhaps the thing we are most proud of is the new vignetting in version 1.1. We took out the old crappy and buggy vignetting and recoded it completely. So now the quality of the vignetting is stunning and probably the best in any iPad or iPhone app. It’s much more stable as well, which will be welcome to some users. On the downside, it’s slower so it’s best to apply it as last.

We’ve also added a social banner, in the same wood, leather and parchment style as the rest of the interface. This social banner is a quick guide to the iPhone version of MonoPhix, the Facebook page so you can share your creations and our twitter to stay up to date on the latest MonoPhix news. You could call it stylish shameless advertising.

As MonoPhix HD progresses and becomes more advanced it also becomes more complicated to newer users so that’s why we added an online PDF help file. This might be welcome to look some things up. For an easy app like MonoPhix we still managed to write a 6 page guide.

Other improvements include an indicator to show when MonoPhix is saving your picture to the library and a whole busload of bugfixes. An improvement for us on the other hand is a one time message which will ask you to rate MonoPhix HD, it will pop up once at an unknown time and will never be seen again.

The update is tested by the finest iPhoneographers and reviewers and has been changed multiple times in the testing process to avoid unwanted bugs or flaws, so special thanks to the people who keep MonoPhix bug free (in alphabetical order):
-Ashish Ajmani
-Dani Cox
-Glyn Evans
-Patrick Timney
-Raj Gupta

Go ahead and update now!

Or if you don’t have MonoPhix HD yet, download it here: http://hur.lu/3C6p

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Here’s a list version of all changes (so you don’t have to read that horribly long text):
-Faster updating of the preview when changes are applied
-Faster saving
-Settings panel with the ability to resize the preview for better performance or better view of the changes
-Noise generator with slider for adjustable intensity
-Quantization slider to reduce the amount of colors
-Negative switch
-Improved and smoother vignetting
-PDF help file
-Button for more info on the iPhone version (Social Banner)
-Button to access the MonoPhix Facebook page for picture sharing (Social Banner)
-Button to access our twitter feed for the latest news on MonoPhix (Social Banner)
-Saving indicator
-Name change of the “Alpha & Exposure”-button to “Processing”
-One time “Review” message
-Displaying of the version information in the settings panel
-A busload of bugfixes

Quantizing an image in MonoPhix HD 1.1 (Screenshot courtesy of Raj Gupta)