spcial Camera for iPhone

Camera+ by taptaptap had been pulled from the official App Store due to a hidden feature which violated Apple’s user interface rules. Since then, Camera+ has been given a fairly significant overhaul and is now available in the App Store and currently on sale for $0.99.
In my original review I had a number of complaints about this app, and I am happy to report that they addressed almost every one of them in their more recent releases.
My biggest complaint about this app was how long it took before you could actually take a picture when first launching it. The old interface has been dropped, in favor of a much more traditional approach. Launching the app now takes about the same amount of time as the built in camera app and you are immediately able to take pictures.
A new feature being touted by taptaptap is Clarity. The created a very cute, CSI-like video to show off the abilities of this feature and describe it as follows.

We created Clarity for Camera+ to help turn all the shots you take into perfect photos. Clarity analyzes your photos and makes several intelligent adjustments that magically bring out details and breathe life into dull photos. There’s no need to futz with complicated and confusing controls… behind the scenes, we do all that and more for you through innovative “smart-processing”.
And with Clarity, you’ll stop throwing out “bad” photos… you’ll be amazed to see what it can do to photos that you’d typically consider unusable, like shots that came out too dark.
The results are so good that you’re going to think that we sold our souls to achieve them.

These are pretty big claims and I tried using Clarity on a number of pictures I had saved on my phone. For the most part, I was impressed. For a one touch solution, Clarity mostly lives up to it’s much hyped claims. But does tend to produce an overly contrasty image in some cases, and will bring out noise in darker areas. Some images only require a slight adjustment and can appear over-processed after applying Clarity.
This leads me to my one gripe that was not fixed from the previous version I tested. The editing presets are not adjustable in any way. It’s a one click solution, and if you don’t like the results, your only option is to move onto the next preset. My suggestion would be to give us a slider to control the amount of clarity, or other effect that is applied to each photo, or at least a low, medium and high option. Maybe I’m spoiled by the power of Adobe Lightroom and PhotoShop, but I feel that this feature would make the editor in Camera+ that much more impressive.
That being said, Camera+ has become my new default camera app on iPhone. The new, more streamlined interface and social networking capabilities combined with it’s already powerful feature set, make this app hard to beat. For $0.99, this really is a must buy for anyone looking to take their iPhone photography to the next level.