iPhoto (for iPad)

There's no shortage of photo-editing apps for iOS, many of them well-suited to the larger (and now retinal) screen of the iPad. A good example is Snapseed ($4.99, 4.5 stars), which Apple awarded Best iPad App of 2011 in its iTunes App Store Rewind 2011, and Photoshop Touch, from the world's preeminent image software house, Adobe. But when Apple itself puts out a competing photo-editing app, and especially one named for its beloved Mac staple, watch out. iPhoto is a marvel of interface design, and it offers some stunning editing and enhancing tools. It also introduces appealing new ways to share your photos.

At a very affordable $4.99 in the iTunes App Store, iPhoto for iPad (it's actually a "universal" iOS app, meaning it also runs on iPhones) equals Snapseed in price, while Photoshop Touch runs twice that, at $9.99. The latter is something of a different animal, an image-editing powerhouse able to accomplish some of the magic found in desktop Photoshop, like content-aware fill. Snapseed can't match iPhoto for beauty of interface or organizational tools, but it can do more in the way of subtle image editing and embellishing.

iPhoto's remarkable user interface features multitouch gestures for photo correction, brushes for applying effects onto specific areas of a photo. The app also adds the notion of "Journals" for creating attractive photo collections that can be shared on iCloud. Some nifty organization tools include the ability to identify similar photos with a double-tap, as well as to flag, favorite, or remove images. As with any good photo editor, iPhoto for iPad offers a simple button that takes you right back to your original image view.

Getting Started with iPhoto for iPad
The first thing you need to know is that you have to update your iPad's firmware to iOS 5.1 if you haven't already done so. You'll want to do that anyway, since, among other goodies, the 5.1 update lets you delete Photo Stream photos and use speech input in the keyboard. It also brings a new Camera app, fixes sound in TV shows and movies played on the iPad, and fixes some battery-draining bugs.

Interface
The home screen in iPhoto for iPad shows four tabs along the top: Albums, Photos, Events, and Journals. Tapping into any of these except for Journals, takes you to an individual photo page, and a grid icon displays thumbnails of all the photos in the album along the left (you can switch between one, two, or three columns for this, or move it to the right). As with Snapseed, a question mark button is always present, to show you overlays that explain what all the controls on the screen do, or bring up help. Next to this, an undo arrow lets you backtrack at any time, but the redo option is fairly well hidden: it appears under the Undo icon if you hold it down after an undo. A helpful button at top right lets you quickly view the original image after any amount of edits. A nearby "i" info icon shows camera, size, and date for the present photo (but unfortunately, not the file name).

Once you're in a photo page, you can tap the Edit button at top-right for a slew of options. Along the bottom left, icons access crop and straighten, exposure, color, brushes, and effects. In the middle are your Auto-Enhance (which worked fairly well for me except on difficult exposures), Rotate 90 degrees, Flag, Favorite, and an X for Hide. I would have preferred to see more than one auto option, however, with different options separated out for brightness, color, and so on.

Adjusting brightness and contrast is handled in a way that's innovative for the touch interface. A bar along the bottom represents the image from its darkest to lightest tones, and you can either tap on the picture and swipe up or down to increase or decrease brightness, and right or left to do the same for contrast. The Apple-award-winning Snapseed for iPad uses a similar swiping approach, but both have the drawback of not letting you zoom while in this adjustment mode. Alternatively, you can slide points on the bar at the bottom that correspond to the darkest and brightest points, or to points along the bar that indicate contrast. So moving the leftmost end of the bar can make a photo darker than its darkest value, and the same goes for brightness on the right. It's sort of a histogram without the graph.

The artist's palette icon offers the five adjusters shown along the bottom?saturation, blue skies, greenery, skin tones, and white balance. Just swipe up or down to increase or decrease each adjustment. Occasionally, it would mistake some non-human object for having skin color, but if you place your finger on sky blue, the option changes to darken or brighten the intensity of the sky?a nice trick. You can choose standard white balance settings like sun, clouds, or flash, but you can also set a custom white balance based on a person's skin in the photo or a neutral tone in the photo. One problem I had with this tool, though, was that I couldn't pick up my finger and swipe again to increase or decrease the effect, as I could in Snapseed's similar tools.

Cropping and straightening is also cleverly implemented. You can pinch and zoom within a set crop frame, or resize the frame with or without preserving aspect ratio. But neatest of all is the ability to level by holding the iPad at an angle after tapping on the compass-like control below the photo. This takes advantage of the device's accelerometer. You can also just twist two fingers on the photo (the way most people will probably do it).

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