App Review: MOLO Photo Filters 2

The cameras currently available on our webOS devices leave a lot to be desired. With low horsepower, long load times, and an absence of autofocus or manual controls, they're not up to the task of taking over as our primary shooters. However, there's still a huge role for them as the device that "captures the moment," and with an app like MOLO Photo Filters Pro you can add considerable impact those photos you’re taking on the fly.

MOLO offers 19 different filter options offering a range of different adjustments to saturation, sharpness, hue, and contrast, as well as textural and framing effects to give photos a unique look. Chinchilla Tech stated one of the goals of the app was to create filters that gave a "low-fi" character to your images, and they definitely succeeded. Molo can also clean up and balance your shots or really trip them out if you want.

Features

The interface for MOLO Photo Filters Pro is simple: windows showing before and after thumbnails, a progress indicator, filter list, and buttons to select photo, filter, and re-filter. As of this writing, the app has a dropdown list of 17 filters and 5 frames, all designed in-house by one of the two developers in the team. Chinchilla Tech noted that “For the sake of simplicity and to encourage experimentation” they decided against providing a detailed description of each filter inside the app, but they were nice enough to pass along some clever descriptions of what you can expect for this review:

• MOLO: High contrast and saturation with vignetting and a hint of sharpness.
• Rockstar: Monochrome destruction.
• Mars: Red tint and a scratchy, dusty texture with a low saturation.
• Dazed: Blurry ghosting, high contrast, and overblown colors.
• Julee: Dreamlike and blurry, with lower saturation.
• Blues: Blue tint and a cooler feel.
• Scuffed: Face down on the pavement.
• X-Pro: High contrast and funky coloration. Simulates cross processing film in the wrong chemical solution.
• Grainy: Film graininess.
• Leaky: Light leaks expose the corners of the film.
• Mono: High contrast monochromatic with a smooth finish.
• Ginger: Golden yellow tint, a little washed out.
• Washed: Washed out colors and high contrast.
• Bleach Bypass: Black and white over color. Lower saturation with higher contrast. Simulates processing technique.
• Normalize: Normalizes colors to a nice base.
• Three: Funky colors with pink highlights and green shadows.
• Redscale: Simulates turning your film backwards. Almost nonexistent blues.

MOLO has some nice additional conveniences built in as well. If you want to layer more than one filter onto an image, the ‘ReFilter’ button lets you do it in one step. After you’ve finished filtering, tapping on the new image brings you viewing and sharing options. Here you can view large versions of your “before and after” shots, set the image as your wallpaper, send it via text or email, and even upload it Twitter or Flickr.

Performance

After tapping on one of the two filter buttons, your photo is uploaded to Chinchilla Tech’s web service where the selected filter is applied. The newly filtered image is then downloaded back to your device. On a 3G connection, the entire process of uploading a typical Pre photo, filtering and downloading the new image takes under a minute. WiFi’s faster still. If you’re running other apps at the same time (what webOS user isn’t?) and want to switch gears while Molo’s doing it’s thing, it has banner notifications for great background operation. Chinchilla Tech noted that webOS has been their primary development platform for over the past year, and you can tell that they “get” how to best use multitasking on it by the speed and polish of this product.

For those a little nervous about having their photographs uploaded to the cloud for processing, rest assured. Chinchilla Tech’s server deletes the images after 30 minutes, They’re responsive to user feedback, and continue to add new filters and frames as well. (In fact, the last 5 filters were added while I was in the middle of writing this up.) Molo Photo Filters is currently only available on the webOS platform, but they note plans of expanding into WP7 and iOS in the future.

Conclusion

If the style of these filters seems familiar, you’ve probably seen lomography shots taken with a Holga camera. These classic shooters can be found at Urban Outfitters among other places and enjoy a cult following. Of course they're single-effect, require medium-format film, and run anywhere from $20-$50+ each. MOLO Photo Filters Plus on the other hand has all the effects, is pretty close to instant, and is available now for $1.99 in the App Catalog. You do the math.

MOLO Photo Filters Plus is lightweight, fast, feature packed, and delivers results which are a significant improvement in quality over the shots our webOS devices can take on their own. After playing around with it for a few days, including getting some great results filtering photos from my dSLR through it, I can safely say I’ll probably run the majority of my Pre’s shot’s through Molo before uploading. It's that good. So if the best camera for any particular shot is the one you have with you, why not use an app to make that camera a whole lot better? There's even a free version of the app available so you can kick the tires before taking a little off the top of your next-gen webOS hardware piggybank.