Pocket Artist 3

Supplier: Conduits Technologies, Inc
Product: Pocket Artist
Version: 3.11
Cost: Conduits Direct = $49.95 USD
(30 Day trial available)
Tested on: O2 Xda IIsOne thing that has always bugged me about using an Xda is that once I’ve used the in built camera to take a photo I have to transfer it onto a PC to do anything remotely creative with it, there are times when all I want to do is simply crop an image or change the colour balance/brightness, in this case transferring to the PC and firing up Photoshop seems overkill. So I scoured Handango and PocketGear looking for something to fit the bill, imagine my surprise when I stumbled over Pocket Artist, claiming to have many features that you normally only see in a top end PC image editing package, so just how good is it? Read on to find out!

BASIC FUNCTIONALITY

So, first things first, how does it manage my initial requirements of a simple image editor for my photos.

Test 1 (see image above). Take one photo rotate it, crop it, as you can see below Pocket Artist breezes through this with flying colours.

“Breezes it” that is, until we come to saving the finished image, the version of Pocket Artist (3.1) that I’m using for this review has problems saving jpeg images, basically producing a random striped image.

A quick visit to the Conduits website offered up a newer version of the software which apparently fixes the problem (v3.11) …. It seems to work ok on photos but actually produces a greyscale image on one that I created from scratch!

As I have an Xda IIs I don’t get the opportunity to suffer from red eye so to test the Red-Eye Brush function I loaded in a pic taken with another camera.

Red Eye Brush – It looks a bit extreme on these pics but it looks ok at normal size, and certainly as good as these tools usually are in PC packages.

PA, also has all the other usual features such as text tools, allowing you to add captions to images for immediate emailing etc.

ADVANCED FEATURES

There’s a very good description of all the tools on the conduits website so I’ll not reinvent the wheel Click Here

But just in case you really can’t tear yourself away from my review then see the image above to see which tools are available.

So, as you can see there is a pretty extensive group of tools on offer and it gets better. Layers and Channels are present and correct, turning on the layer & Channel toolbars opens up another world of functionality and whilst I have come to expect this from any graphics package on the PC I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting it on the PPC.

I should point out at this point that I in no way consider myself to be a good artist (despite being in a family full of great artists 8-( ), I like messing with Photoshop but I’m not much good at basic drawing so I’d struggle to really put the package through it’s paces. However, I gave it to one of the aforementioned “good artists” in my family for a few minutes, a guy who uses Photoshop professionally day in, day out and he was suitably impressed, as an ex IIs owner he was also a touched shocked that this level of functionality was available in a PPC.

Like most people, I’ve played with Photoshop filters trying to make the best of a photo or find an interesting effect for a wallpaper, so it’s good to see that PA has it’s share of filters, all the usual suspects are there and you can get some decent results.

Some of the tools, Clone Stamp for instance, require the use of the “Action Key” in conjunction with the stylus, on my IIs this key is the one at the centre of the ‘D’ pad and works ok if a little fiddly from time to time.

FILE FORMATS

Predictably enough Pocket Artist doesn’t make as good a job of creating Gifs and Jpegs as Photoshop’s “Save For Web” function, gradients for instance aren’t that smooth when compared to Adobe's expensive flagship. Fortunately PA has another trick up his sleeve, it can open and save Photoshop psd files, which can then be opened in Photoshop without losing any quality. In fact, PA will open and save images as psd, jpg, bmp, gif & png formats.

Pros:

• • Supports Photoshop PSD format
  • Filter (SDK available)
  • Layers
  • Channels
  • Extensive selection tools
  • Pluggable brush packs and gradient packs
  • Animated Gif wizard
  • Colour Adjustment
  • 24-bit colour editing

Cons:

• • Jpeg support still seems to have slight issues
  • I experienced severe hanging from the app from time to time
  • Menus aren’t as intuitive as they might be

CONCLUSION

In case it hasn’t come across here, I’m really impressed with what Conduits have done here. It works on a few levels, firstly as a basic image editing package as per my original requirements and secondly as quite a well featured artistic toolkit allowing original images to be created. Lastly, and this is probably how I will use it most, as a tool for drafting up rough ideas which can then be loaded into Photoshop for finishing off.

Using the PPC with a stylus is of course a very natural way to draw and despite the fact that you don’t get the pressure sensitivity of a decent graphics tablet it still knocks the socks off using a mouse.

Whilst there are still a few small niggles, the hit and miss jpg creation and I experienced a 5 minute wait once when trying to contract a selection by 50 pixels for instance, Conduits have created a very solid package and seem committed to continuing to expand it and assist the community by making it as extensible as possible.

4WM Score: 95%

Gold Medal