VSCOcam is neat 12 September 2013
I’ve been playing around with VSCOcam for the last week or so and, with a brand new blog, it seemed like a good time to post a review.
What I love
- Excellent control over settings. You have a lot more options for developing the image than a magic auto-adjust button. You can adjust exposure, recover shadows or highlights, adjust temperature and tint. It’s not the same as developing RAW files but it feels a lot more like it.
- You get a lot of nice filters for free. VSCO sells additional ones but I haven’t made the jump yet. The $6 bundle of all 38 filters is looking really tempting though.
- Posting a decent photo with the #vscocam hash tag to Instagram will result in a bunch of likes from people you don’t know. It’s awesome for the ego and a great way to find new people to follow.
- The Grid is nice, clean website for presenting your photos.
What could be better
- The interface is very modal. While editing it’s hard to jump back and forth between tools, you have to keep clicking ✔ or ✖ then picking the next tool. When you open a image it defaults to choosing a preset but my preference is cropping first, tweaking basic exposure and then trying out presets.
- I didn’t realize you could swipe the adjustment tool bar to reveal another two pages of tools until I saw the option in the settings to reorder them.
- You end up with photos in two places since it has a separate photo library. I’d guess there are some good technical reasons for the separation but it means you have to import your photos you don’t capture in the app and export the edited photos to see them in other apps.
- It kills my battery. But I guess that’s what I should expect after spending an hour of my commute constantly tweaking photos.
- The Grid doesn’t have oEmbed support which makes it more of a pain to for me to link images from my blog.
As I was about to post this they released 2.1 which fixed the two biggest annoyances I’d encountered. Now the crop tool shows indicators for thirds and you can zoom in on images while editing to check details. I’m excited to see what the next release has in store.
The bottom line is it is an amazing app. I’ve been taking photos like I bought a new camera, it’s just that much fun.