App it Up: Freaky Fotos Pro
by at December 24, 2009 8:28 pm
Sections: iPhone, iPhone OS, SDK and hacks, iPhone/iPod touch/iPad, Originals
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Developer: Whiteboard Ventures
Requirements: iPhone OS 3.1 or later
Compatibility: iPhone
File Size: 1.2MB
What is it?
Freaky Fotos Pro allows you to add ghostly images to your photos. What else would you expect from an app we’re covering on Christmas Eve?
How does it work?
You’ve likely seen the supposed “real” images of people or places with ghostly forms floating in the background (or, more accurately, floating on semi-transparent Photoshop layers). Freaky Fotos makes it easy to create such images, albeit in a limited and buggy capacity. You can select an image already on your iPhone, or you can take your own. Once you’ve got it open, the ghost is laid on top of it. Nearly 25 ghosts are currently included, although many of these are simply heads, faces or body parts. You can change your ghost from within the photo, or you can select it ahead of time if you know what you want.
Simple placement options are offered, including the ability to rotate the ghost, resize it and move it around. Unfortunately, the control is still a bit buggy. The phone often ignored my request to resize the ghosts, or would pop it back to its full size after I’d shrunk it down. This gets frustrating, as it hurts the overall effect if I can’t get perfect placement. Also, the program has trouble with landscape photos. You can’t rotate the phone to see the landscape photo full size, and when I saved the enhanced image to the camera, the photo was pushed down so the top half of the frame was empty blackness, as seen in the screen capture below.
Note how small that image is. Exporting from the iPhone to iPhoto, the image came through at that size; 320 pixels wide, which would be logical if it were in portrait mode. Something’s obviously not working here.
And finally, there’s no option to crop the ghost image, so you can’t create the effect of having your ghost behind objects. The developers worked around this by giving you disembodied heads, arms, hands, etc. for placement, and they work quite well.
Features
Sum it Up
I love the idea behind Freaky Fotos Pro, but I think the app needs more work. Resizing the ghosts is a buggy process, and its inability to handle landscape photos is an odd oversight. If you can deal with the limitations of the current version, however, you’re sure to get a kick out of it. I can myself using this to my advantage at the family Christmas gathering:
“Hey, mom, that’s a great photo of the family in from the of three, but what’s behind…my God! It’s dead Uncle Phil!”
Cost – $1.99
Worth the Money? – Not yet. You can get it now and hope for a free upgrade, or wait until the bugs are fixed.
Availability – Now, in the iTunes App Store
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