Design Snazzy Collages with PhotoShake – PadGadget iPad Photography Series
Part of PadGadget’s continuing series Become An Expert With PadGadget’s iPad Photography Series.
PhotoShake encourages you to play with your photos, selecting up to ten of them to use in an easy to create collage. Choose your photos, shake your iPad, and be amazed with the photo compilations you can create.
To begin, choose the layout you would like to work with. You can use a single photo, or up to twelve different photos. Choosing a single photo layout allows you to alter the photo to fit into a certain aspect or turns it into an instant photo with a Polaroid-like frame.
Choosing multiple photos allows you a wider range of layouts to work with, in all different arrangements. There’s also a grid for a perfectly square collage, a wide photo option that’s great for landscapes, and a wall paper option to make wall paper sized images for the iPad, iPhone 4, and iPhone 3G.
When you’ve chosen a layout, you can take pictures using the iPad 2, or import from a variety of sources, like the camera album, Flickr, or Wi-Fi from any computer, which is a nice feature. From the photo import menu, you can also choose to add any map from Google Maps. Your layouts change based on the number of photos you’ve chosen to use.
After the basic collage is made, you can make several further alterations. The collages work a lot like vector images, and using the handler tool, you can drag the lines of the frames to different slanted positions. You can also add several border and corner options to make your collage look more polished.
From this alteration menu, you can change the content of your collage cells. Photos can be moved around to optimal locations and zoomed in to feature key elements, using either your finger or the controls on the bottom. There are six filters that can be applied to just one photo in the collage, or to the entire collage, for a myriad of potential looks.
Fully editable speech and thought bubbles can be added. You can change their size, shape, color, font, and more. In addition to the speech bubbles, you can decorate your collage with 36 different stickers in shapes like hearts, butterflies, and balloons. Stickers can be made smaller or larger, and added in any color.
All of your creations are stored in an organized album format. PhotoShake can upload your collages in a variety of sizes, and in several different ways. You can send them in an email, print them using air print, export using Wi-Fi, or export to one of 14 social networks, including Twitter, Flickr, and Tumblr.
If you get confused about all of the available options, there’s an in-depth tutorial that explains each and every function the app is capable of. PhotoShake is pretty straightforward on its own though, and very easy to use.
PhotoShake is without a doubt the most complete photo collage creating app in the App Store. It does everything you could possibly want in a photo compilation app, and allows for each collage and each image in the collage to be fully customizable in every way.
What I liked: There were a wide variety of layouts and photo arrangements, which made every collage that I made feel unique. It was always a fun experience to see how the app would arrange my photos.
What I didn’t like: The app does not mention that you need Location Services turned on, and without it, you may not be able to access the iPad’s Photo Album. Other than that, this app was unstable once or twice when I was trying to save a photo, and I lost all my work. However, most of the time, it functioned just fine, and the problem may have been high resolution photos.
To buy or not to buy: For just $1.99, this app provides a great way to create compilation photos of events, people, and places. I can pretty much guarantee that this app won’t be a disappointment, and that it’s worth the cost if you like to make collages.
- App Name: PhotoShake
- Version Reviewed: 1.1.0
- Category: Photography
- Developer: Motion One.co.Ltd
- Price: $1.99
- Score:
