A facebook friend from Finland (or FFFF for short) introduced me to Snapseed app on the iPad. I've fiddled with similar quickie photo retouch applications in the past on many platforms, but they always had the same problem: you would have a few cool filters and lots of ones that just ruined the pictures in an interesting way. Thus after a while all the images would come out looking almost exactly the same. The more flexible option was to shell out hundreds of $$$ for Photoshop and then hundreds of hours learning how to achieve something that looks cool. Snapseed seems to find the happy medium - there's a finite amount of filters but each come with enough configurability to fit the filter to the image in a natural way. One can also combine the filters like layers on Photoshop for even greater variation.
The number one differentiator to all the other photo retouch apps I've tried as well as to Photohop is the UI. It's just extremely natural and things that take a lot effort on a PC with mouse can be done in seconds with the multi-touch UI on the iPad. You can always quickly compare the filtered image to the original (or product of the previously applied change) and there's never a feeling of losing the image in the process - you can tweak a filter a lot and still decide to go back and not apply it. All changes are visible on the image in real time and the app is really quick on the iPad 2. There's a limit of 16MP on the image size, which should definitely be sufficient. I've played around with the app with images I've already resized for web consumption, but Snapseed is turning out to be such a powerful tool I might start to transfer full-resolution versions to it. Well, almost full as my DSLR (550D) has a 18MP sensor.
The big problem with iPad is Apple's walled garden and how difficult it makes to move files to and from the iPad. I flatly refuse to install iTunes to my Windows machine due to how craptastically bad the software has always been. The only Mac in the family is with my wife so that's not an easy solution either. Luckily Snapseed supports iCloud and there's a Windows 7 iCloud client available from Apple. The client is pretty simple to use - I just copy images to the designated upload directory when I want to make them available for Snapseed and the finalised pictures from Snapseed arrive another - firewalls permitting. Snapseed is also able to publish pictures in flickr and facebook directly; I use the former.
Finally, Photoshop CS5 costs $699, whereas Snapseed is $4.99. Notice the decimal point. One's an investment, the other an impulse buy.
I've only just begun to learn this fantastic tool, or play thing, but I'm definitely hooked already. You can follow the results here.
