Magic Hour Photo App

 

As you know, I love taking photos, whether it’s with a film camera or a digital one. Since I got an iPod Touch a year ago, I have had fun playing with all kinds of different photo apps.

I find out about a lot of them from following the Life in LoFi blog by Marty Yawnick. He reviews them all the time, and lets you know when they are on sale or free! Today I read about this new app, called Magic Hour, that I had to try it. Today is the last day it’s on sale for only $0.99!

As soon as I read Marty’s review, I downloaded it, and went to try it out with my faithful photo assistant, Ruby.

 

 

The first two photos were taken directly with the app, and then I chose existing filters to use. Even though Marty has a great review of it, I’ll take you through the process of how I used the app with one of my photos.

 

 

I took the above photo with my iPod Touch. With the Magic Hour app, you can either take photos using the app, or open a photo from your photo library.

 

 

Here’s what you see when you open the app. It’s easy to use and pretty self-explanatory. I was happy with the different things you could do with it, yet it was simple. The opening screen is labeled with the buttons for you to choose a photo or take one. It also has the settings button, and the filters button. You don’t need to worry about the filters yet, but you might want to look at the settings. (I didn’t do anything with the settings until later, but you might want to set the resolution before you take pictures.)

 

 

 

Here, I opened up the picture I had taken in the cemetery. You can scale the image, or move it around where you want it inside the white box, which shows how it will be cropped. You can also rotate or flip the photo. When you are done, click “done.”

 

 

Next, you choose a filter, and it shows a thumbnail of your photo with the filter applied, making it easier to choose. There are a lot to choose from–not only the ones that come with the app, but there are also filters available that were created by other users for you to use.

 

 

I chose the “Old Magazine” filter, then saved it. Below is the photo with the filter applied to it.

 

 

After you select the filter, you can click on the “recreate” button to make changes, which in turn creates a new filter.

 

 

You can change various things, such as the brightness, contrast, the vignetting, textures & frames. Here, I’m changing the frame. After I made the changes I wanted, I saved them, The photo below shows my new filter.

 

 

After you select the filter, or create a new one, you can also use the tilt-shift setting. That allows you to focus on a selected part of your photo with the rest of it blurring out. It’s a great effect which draws attention to the focused area. My very first two photos in this post use tilt shift to focus on the top part of the cross.

 

 

Then you can save the filter, name it, and choose whether to share it with other people also using the app. I named mine “Sepia Cemetery,” as you can see, and shared it. I like that the preview with all of the filters shows the picture before and after the filter is applied to it. That gives you a better idea of what the filter does to the photo. You can download any of the shared filters for free!

 

 

The above screen shows my filter available in the new filters section! That’s kind of fun!

Remember the photo I took the other day at my local nursery? The one below, to be exact.

I played around with it in Magic Hour, and look what I came up with!

 

 

I saved and shared this filter too. It’s called “Dramatic Flower.” If you want to use either of my filters, you can search for them in the “filter market” section. If you do, I’d love to see your photos!

If you want to try  Magic Hour out, today, Jan. 15th, is the last day it’s on sale for $0.99. After that, it’s back up to $1.99. I see myself using this app a lot! Have fun!