One of the photo apps that I’m fondest of is little $1.99 thing called Plastic Bullet. $4.99 on the Mac.
The name is most misleading because the results are ever so dreamy and surreal, and very satisfying, but the app is named for the toy camera effects it is said to produce.
Take a photo or pick one from your camera roll on any iOS device – and sit back. Just swipe to go through an infinite number of transformations to your picture. That’s all it takes, really, as you have no control and there’s no sliders and settings or adjustments. That’s sad in a way, but on the other hand, you have the effects served up to you as presets.
The effects are a play with light and color leaks, blurs and vignettes and just a touch of texture and borders. I often gasp at the change in my photo, which immediately turns into a finished product, sometimes looking like quite a work of art. Since I’m that fond of photo apps, I have this nice trick of taking a photo through multiple apps – and then finally polishing them off with Plastic Bullet (actually called Plastic Bullet 2). It’s nothing short of amazing. It has startling effects on a black and white photo too.
I use it on the iPad and take my time playing with photos, but anyone who uses the iPhone will love the look instantly produced and shareable on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Tumblr. Not Instagram, surprisingly. You can save to your camera roll, of course, and you can choose one of three sizes. And there’s support for hi res and large files, though I haven’t tried any.
Plastic Bullet is wanting in a bit of variety though. Technically, the effects are infinite, but they are rather similar. You may get page after page of transformations in which no two effects are identical, but definitely they’re all within one style and class and after five or six swipes, you’re likely to make your selection and be done with it. What I’d love is an infusion of new variations and colors, maybe through a hefty upgrade. Come on, Red Giant Software. While you’re at it, your photo gallery is not doing justice to the lovely results possible with the app.
A little pink flower wakes up with some light and color
Mala, I keep meaning to ask you — what do you use for screencaps of videos you review?
Plastic Bullet does look like fun to play with… but then what do you do with the pics?
I use VLC Playwer which has an in-built screen capture feature. VLC is a must on any PC.
What do I do with my ‘effected’ pictures? Right after I admire them, I take them to the social networks. facebook is full of them So is Instagram. Instagram, of course is great fun. A small bunch of people begin to follow each other regularly and enjoy each others’ photographs. For example, I love following the photos of a girl from Finland. She posts these amazing unreal looking scenes of the snow there and trees all frozen up. Very start and beautiful. Then, someone in Italy regularly drives me nuts with his photos of the most amazing looking food. I think he’s a chef and a musician. All I know is I might get fatter just looking at those pictures. Then, I follow quite a few people because of their cats. I can’t keep one of my own but I do love following the daily antics of others’. The person in Italy has a fat furry chocolate colored cat called Bucci who gives him the weirdest accusing stares.
So that’s how it goes. I suppose they have their own reasons on following my photos.
Irina, do you like this layout better for this blog? I can’t seem to find anything that totally separates the content. At some point I’ll either need to separate the dance blog or get some wordpress services company to do something drastic.
Gotcha. I do have VLC, but while I watch most of my videos on my old PC laptop (larger screen, better angles) I tend to write the reviews on my mac laptop. But I may have VLC on the mac too…
I do like the layout better — it’s easy to switch between categories, and the little pics give an easy visual way of checking out what posts are available. I don’t think you have to totally divide everything. For example, I liked running across this entry on photos, although I only ever come to your blog for the dance stuff. But that’s also why I wanted to be able to see what the newest posts in Dance and Fitness were, without having to scroll through ten more recent posts on tech…