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TouchUp for iPad

23.02.2011
, a $3 app from , is a genuinely fun-to-use photo manipulation tool. Using your fingertip and the app's cleverly simplified interface, amateur photographers can tweak their photos in myriad ways. The app packs in more than a dozen effects, and you add and adjust them to your photos in any combination, without any fear of destroying the original. If you're intimidated by , or even intimidated by photo editing controls, TouchUp may provide the right mix of powerful functionality and ease-of-use that you crave.

The first step, of course, is getting the photo you want to work with. You can open an image from your iPad's Photo Library, or you can import new photos from Flickr's "recent photos" stream (though oddly, not your own Flickr photos). I don't keep all my photos on my iPad, so getting photos into TouchUp tends to involve grabbing them from a Website where I've already uploaded the originals, or e-mailing them to myself. I'd welcome Dropbox integration.

Once you find the photo you'd like to use--and note that the app works better with larger source photos--you choose effects from the popover menu. You can choose from contrast, brightness, temperature, black and white, sepia, hue shift, blur, saturation, and tint; more effects are available via in-app purchases.

I started with a photo of my younger daughter Sierra holding a pumpkin. Her big sister Anya was cut off in the corner behind her, and I felt the ornate bench that the girls were sitting on distracted from Sierra. First, I added a Contrast filter layer, using a slider to adjust how much contrast I added. TouchUp provides a live preview with each slider adjustment, so you can see exactly how the effect will impact the photo.

Next, I added Blur. Instead of a slider, the Blur effect lets you choose among five degrees of blurriness. As with all effects in TouchUp, when you first apply Blur, it blurs the entire photo. That's when TouchUp's magic really begins. I didn't want the entire photo blurred, just the parts without my daughter. Once you've added an effects layer to your image, TouchUp lets you erase (or re-draw) that effect with your fingertip. I started "erasing" the Blur from the photo's background. When I'd finished my first pass, I used two fingers to zoom in and fine-tune my work, drawing back in the blur where I'd erased it unintentionally.

It's OK to make mistakes, since your original photo remains unchanged. Unfortunately, however, TouchUp supports only a single level of Undo. If I accidentally blurred Sierra's face, and then added Blur again elsewhere before tapping Undo, I'd be forced to delete the entire effects layer and start again.