It’s a fact: Apple’s iPhone has climbed up the ladder in cameraphone popularity, and if you take a look at Flickr, one of the most popular online photography sites, it’s evident on charts. Now, once you take pics to send to an online site, wouldn’t it be convenient to have a mini-Photoshop that you can carry along with you instead of having to download the photos to your computer to edit? Look no more: Photogene is the answer.

This app will let you do pretty much any of the basic image editing tasks you would need to touch up an image that you have taken from the iPhone. The basic tasks include crop, rotate, sharpen, color adjust, symbols (add speech bubbles and cutesy stuff if you so desire), and frames (add a little flair to the bordering).

Within each task is additional options, such as ratio (crop), straigten (rotate), levels/color/effect (all in Color Adjust), and background color (Frames). These options add even more possibilities with the new outcomes of your edited photos; the possibilities that you can end up with from all the various editing tools is endless. Moving the slider to even a slight direction will change the photo, and it will be apparent in an instant. But what looks good will be up entirely to the person editing (of course).

This app is not unforgiving either, there are plenty of ways to go back to the original state of the photo or remove an edit. There are undo/redo buttons, and there is the ever persistent ‘Cancel/Reset’ button that can be found in Crop, Rotate, Sharpen, and Color Adjust. Each change made to the photo will be recorded, so you can undo to the very beginning. When you’re finally done, simply tap the check box at the bottom and you’ll get options to save or edit a new photo; if saved, it will appear in your Camera Roll.

The great thing about this app is the ability to simply exit out of the application without saving and then being able to pick up exactly where you left off with the next launch of the app. When you open the app, it will give you options of ‘Edit new photo’ or ‘Continue Last Session’. This is excellent if you want to change something small from the last photo you were working on.

The end resolution of the photos doesn’t have much of a difference than before editing, at least not that I have noticed. But really, it’s an iPhone cam, it’s 2 megapixels. It’s not going to really get any worse, is it? Even if it does, it’s still good for being an iPhone picture. At least that’s what I think.

This is a great app to get if you want to edit your iPhone camera photos with great simplicity and a slick interface. Well worth it for the $2.99 price tag in the App Store, even if it was just the cropping and level adjustments. It is not perfect though, due to lack of options that are found in other photography apps.

4.5/5