Review of L-mob for iPhone

Lo-mob is one of the hundreds of applications available for iPhones that make your digital pictures look vintage. It costs $1.99 and offers 38 filters you can apply to pictures in your existing photo library or to new images you take with your phone. The filters are broken down by film and camera type. They include Poloraid (Instamatic) types; 35mm Film Experimentation (you can see the sprockets) as well as a variety of “vintage” looks lifted from plastic cameras, film emulsions and old or faded film.

You can preview the effects on the iPhone’s screen. Within 1-2 seconds of either taking your picture, or choosing it from your library, a scroll-down list of the filter options becomes available. There is a thumbnail and small description for each filter.  The scrolling list of 38 thumbnails is too small to be useful so you will likely pick a filter to see a full screen preview. This is slow. I clocked between 5-8 seconds per picture to apply the filter in the full view preview screen. It takes a similar time to save the image.

That means that for each picture you take on your iphone (sometimes an already slow process) you have to add 10-15 seconds, for a total of about 20 seconds including shutter time. Lo-mob is therefore an application that should be applied to your original pictures once you are finished snapping away, and not en sitio. I know some people find this annoying, but 20 seconds to apply a filter and have your picture ready to send by email or to a social media site such as Facebook or Flickr is really nothing. The alternatives, be they analog or via your computer, are immeasurably longer.

Once you choose your filter you can further manipulate the image by tapping it in the middle.  This brings up a screen where you can choose blur, frame, crop, and vignette options.  This implies even longer editing times, and learning to do this the first time is not intuitive–I rather discovered it by accident. It would be nice if Lo-mob allowed you to save your favorite combination of filter and blur/frame/crop/vignette options as a custom filter.

There is room for improvement in speed and custom options, but all in all, I think this was $1.99 well spent.  Below is a complete list of the filter examples applied to a picture I took with my iPhone in the Zocalo, in Mexico City.

Classic Vintage

35mm Film Experimentation

Through the View Finder

Emulsions

Instant Matic

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