I love taking photos on these cameras because of the element of unpredictability and amazing effects achieved without the use of Photoshop. The main characteristics of photos taken with these cameras are high colour saturation and high contrast styles that lack crispness and detail. So we were excited to discover two great apps that give us the best of both worlds: the beauty of a lo-fi photograph with the convenience of digital files.

Lo-mob (1.19GBP)

Snap

You have two options here – choose a photo from your camera roll or take a new photo. The app has a tendency to crash, so I’d recommend taking your photo first and then importing it into Lo-mob. If you’re working ‘live’ from within Lo-mob and the app crashes, you’ve lost your photo (it’s not stored in your camera roll).

Customise

Lo-mob has a huge collection of camera effects which include colour slide, 6×6 with various tints, 30′s, 60′s, desaturated, instant film and wide format. Once you’ve taken your photo, you can choose from a huge selection of filters, which are displayed as thumbnails. The thumbnails are quite small, but you can select one to see a larger scale image preview. You can’t flick through the other filter previews at this point, instead you have to go back to the filters list and waiting for the next full sized preview to load can take a few seconds.

Once you’ve chosen your filter you can alter it even further by removing the background (slide/instant film borders), keeping the background and removing the filter, converting to black and white and adding and removing vignetting.

Use

You can customise the output photo sizes for Mail, Facebook, Twitter and Picasa (found in your iPhone settings), ranging from 240x320px up to over 1200px. I have my photos for Twitter saved at 600×800 so they upload quickly and saves set to maximum for a high picture quality I can use elsewhere. We’ve been using the DropBox app to make transferring these photos easier.

Pros

• Lots of filters to choose from
• Polished interface
• You have the ability to further customise your picture by adding and removing effects and borders

Cons

• Can be very slow to create a preview of photo effects
• App has a tendency to crash
• You have to go back to the main preview list to view other filters

Camerabag (1.19GBP, available for Mac and PC)

Snap

The Camerabag interface is very simple. Once the app has loaded, you have a holding area where the photo will be displayed with photo, email, save and camera roll icons. Like Lo-mob, you can take photos with your camera or choose from saved photos.

Customise

Once you’ve chosen your photo, Camerabag loads it straight into a large filter preview. This app has far fewer filters than Lo-mob but this gives it a big advantage in terms of speed and stability – I’ve had very few crashes using this app. You can easily flick through all of the available filters by swiping left and right or use the arrow underneath the filter name – which brings up a list of effects.

Use

There are 6 Camerabag filters I regularly use – Helga, Colourcross, Lolo, Instant, Silver and 1974. To make things easier, I can turn off filters I don’t use in Settings. I really like this feature, because it helps make my use of the app more efficient.

The output size of the photos is customisable and ranges from 600px to over 1200px.

Pros

• Speedy
• Lightweight
• Has a fisheye filter
• Easy to flick between filter previews

Cons

• Limited number of effects

Overall, I love both apps for different reasons. If I could pick the best features from two, I’d choose the filter library and quirky interface from Lo-mob, but the speed and filter settings from Camerabag. If you want something simple to use with subtle filters than Camerabag will do everything you need, but if you’re after dramatic effects and lots of them, then Lo-mob is the app for you.