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

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.

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

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)

MonoPhix 3 – Development announcement

MonoPhix 2 for iPhone has been there nearly unchanged for 9 months now. It was and still is a great black & white app that offers features no other black & white app provides. But it should progress in time and could definitely use a few extra features. So while everyone was happily using MonoPhix on the iPhone but cursing its small preview size and its UI, we were developing another branch of MonoPhix named MonoPhix HD for iPad. The iPad version basically served as an incubator for many new features which a black & white app could use. And now we are ready to port all these amazing new features and improvements back to the iPhone version, along with a brand new UI.

Where MonoPhix for iPhone has been damned for its UI which is basically a touch friendly version of our old 36-image express for windows UI, MonoPhix HD has been praised for its sleekness and intuitivity with its leather/wood interface. We’ve been looking to improve the UI for a long time now, but why search when you’ve already found it. We’re just going to miniaturize the MonoPhix HD UI and optimize it for the smaller iPhone’s screen.

On the featureside we’re going to implement all features the HD version has. So these additional features contain:
-Custom coloring
-Burned and bleached vignetting
-Exposure enhancements
-Ability to blend with the original picture
-Noise/Grain generation
-Quantization
-Color inverse switch

Along with these new features MonoPhix 3 will also be equipped with the faster and more qualitative MonoCore3 monochrome filter. Which improves the output quality by factor 8 and the speed by factor 5. These improvements will also make your iPhone’s battery last longer because the new filter requires 10 times less CPU power and 30 times less memory.

And we haven’t forgotten that iOS advanced to version 4, so MonoPhix 3 will support the retina display of the iPhone 4 and will support multitasking.

MonoPhix 3 will be a free update for existing MonoPhix 2 owners. We aren’t going to do any statements about the pricing yet.

MonoPhix 3 should arrive somewhere in the next few months if all goes well.

MonoPhix HD 1.1 brings tons of new features to a great iPad photography app.

Our first iPad app, MonoPhix HD was an amazing success at release and has a steady download count at the moment, so we can’t neglect the tons of users who downloaded it. That’s why I’ve set up the roadmap for the next update to give people an idea of what to expect next time MonoPhix HD shows up in their update list.

First of all some people have had some performance issues, others think it’s justified, but the issue remains that some actions can be quite slow to be applied to the preview. We can’t fix this completely and provide a real time preview, there will always be some lag, but we’re going to improve the performance as good as we can and a lot of simultaneous actions will no longer clog up the app. So each action will be previewed within 2 seconds.

Other changes include better support for vignetting. MonoPhix HD already has great vignetting support, it’s even used by some with the filter alpha set to 0 to apply it to non-monochrome images, but it can be better. So MonoPhix HD 1.1 will have the best vignetting support of any iPad/iPhone app. New features include the ability to set an offset for the vignetting and a different type of vignetting to spread light or shadow from each corner instead of the default round vignetting.

Another interesting feature will be a noise generator which gives your pictures some extra grain. This will certainly benefit some users which like some added vintage effect to their pictures.

You will also have the ability to color your monochrome images in another way than just colouring the white parts in the selected color. In MonoPhix HD 1.1 you will choose what shade you want to recolor.

The other features include a help file, some social features on startup to guide you in showing off your MonoPhix pictures, some live tutorials and gesture support eg. Touch based gestures and shake to reset.

And for the iPhone users don’t fear cause all these features will be coming to MonoPhix 3 for iPhone as well.

MonoPhix HD 1.1 will appear somewhere in the next 2 months. It will not have the UI changes requested by some users yet because that requires some general research but it’s a more than worthy update to version 1.0.

In the meanwhile you can enjoy MonoPhix HD, version 1.1 will come as a free update for 1.0 users.

MonoPhix HD Black & White app for iPad on sale! (-50%)

Just a few days after its release we decided to put MonoPhix HD temporarily on sale. This is a great opportunity for the people who were held back by the slightly higher price on the iPad to learn to know it.

Anyway, to make a long story short, MonoPhix HD has proven to be a great app for many people and it’s now available for 0.99$. But beware, the sale won’t last long so hurry up and get your copy now!

Original Price: 1,99$ Price during sale: 0,99$ Change: -50% Download

New App : MonoPhix HD – Black & White app for iPad

Yesterday our MonoPhix HD app got approved by Apple and today it’s available for download in the App Store.

MonoPhix HD is the iPad variant of our MonoPhix for iPhone. Both apps enable people to open an image and convert it to black and white or other monochrome variants. This seems like a simple task, but MonoPhix provides the users with a set of tools resembling Adobe Lightroom’s black & white tools and more to enable great results which aren’t obtainable by using other Black & White apps.

The iPad version even supports 2 types of slider-adjustable vignetting (Burn/Lighten), allows users to blow out the exposure for great “minimal dark” results or to enhance bright surfaces. It also allows (and this is unique) to set the alpha (transparency) of the Black & White effect so that the original colors show up behind the black & white effect, this can be easily accomplished with a slider. In addition to the Sepia and antique filters of MonoPhix for iPhone, you can now custom colors a black & white photo with 3 sliders. If these features can’t impress you the ability to edit and save pictures at full resolution and at full quality might impress you. Monochrome pictures created with MonoPhix HD don’t lose any of their original quality.

Here’s a list of features:
* Intuitive interface which is very pleasant to use
* Big real time preview of your changes
* High speed filters, so you don’t have to wait constantly
* Great tools to enhance the bright and dark parts of your picture separately
* Ability to custom color a monochrome picture
* Ability to set an Alpha to blend your monochrome with the original picture
* Ability to enhance the exposure of your picture
* Ability to apply 2 types of adjustable vignetting effects to your picture
* Ability to choose for a more raw classic monochrome filter
* Supports high resolution pictures, up to 3000×3000 pixels and higher

Device Requirements:

* iPad (the iPhone version is also available in the App Store)

* Requires iPhone OS 3.2 or later

* 0.2 MB

Pricing and Availability:

MonoPhix HD 1.0 is only $1.99 (USD) and available exclusively through the App Store in the Photography or productivity categories. Interested writers, reviewers and editors can always request a promo code to check it out for themselves.

MonoPhix HD is available for download here>