If there is one area which has been revolutionized by the invention of the iPhone (and iPad) it has been photography and photo manipulation. It’s just that easy to snap a photo and share it with your friends, since you carry your iPhone with you almost all the time.
Percolator, a universal app, adds a new dimension to post-processing your images. It’s a mosaic app, but it’s also much more than that. We’ll take a closer look right after the break.
You Want Coffee With That?
Wait! Yes, we’re still talking about the iPhone app and if you don’t like coffee, stick around anyway. Percolator is a mosaic app that makes your images look tasty and the default settings will remind you of a fresh, hot and wonderful aromatic cup of coffee. No kidding!
The basic idea is that your images are going to be processed (brewed) according to settings you choose and the result will be your image consisting of circles and textures.
Welcome to Percolator! Can you smell it already? Mhmmmm…
As you can see, there are not too many options when you start Percolator for the first time. Simply load an image into the app and watch the magic happen.
Serving to Your Taste
The actual brewing of your new image takes a a couple of seconds, depending on the complexity of the original photo. Just be patient and read the messages on the bottom of the screen for entertainment.
Your images goes from normal to … circle-ish
Once the processing is done, you’ll see … well, you’ll see circles and a lot of them. Also, there is a settings bar on the bottom of the screen where you can manipulate the effects. There are three areas, each with a subset of settings. They allow you to fine tune your image. Simply play around with them.
This is where you'll whip up your own magic recipe
Grind manipulates the number of circles or the texture used. The finer the grind, the more circles are used and the more details can be displayed and vice versa. After every change, you have to re-calculate the image. If you opt for the coarse grind, it will be quite fast. The finer the grind, the longer it takes, but it’s still just about 5-10 seconds.
Coarse, Medium, Fine … whatever works for you
The Brew changes the texture that makes up the new images. You can choose between tasty brews like Overprint (which applies a water color effect), Full of Stars (which turns your image dark and fills the details with glittering stars), Ishihara (which are one-dimensional circles) and many more. All in all, there are eight choices.
Textures galore should satisfy everyone's taste
And finally, you decide how you want your image Served. Again, there are many choices. Basically, they change the background of the textures. Black outlines circles with a black border or generates a black background. Light and Sweet does the same, just in white. If you want to be surprised, just hit the spoon and watch it whip something up (yes, it’s even animated!).
Serve it with a flourish
For Refined Tastes
If you thought that this was the extent of the available options, you were just as fooled as I was. I stumbled onto the more advanced settings by mere accident. If you tap on the names of any of the areas (Grind, Brew, Serve) a more detailed settings pane opens for each of the three. Needless to say, that with those options the number of possible combinations just skyrocketed. There’s so much to discover that it will last you for hundreds of photos.
For Grind, the middle wheel allows you to fine tune the the level of detail while the last wheel offers basic image improvement like sharpening or saturation.
Refine the grind with sheer limitless combinations of more settings
In Brew, the middle wheel controls just how visible your original image is and the last wheel adjust the texture. There are an impossible amount of combinations.
Finetune just how much a texture will refine your image
And when you are ready to Serve, the middle wheel sets the color of the image while the last wheel changes the texture. This ranges from clouds, linoleum to napkin and many more.
Serve your image in a huge number of possible styles
Don’t drink alone
Once you found the perfect combination for your photo, love it by hitting the heart icon. You’ll be presented with a choice of sharing options.
Share your image any way you like
If you opt for a social network, Percolator will prepare the message for you, but you can of course change it before posting. For best results, have your image to go (save to your photo album). Percolator supports output up to 2048 pixel by 2048 pixel.
If you zoom into your final image, you can see that the perfection is in the details. The circles have a texture to them which gives the image more than a one-dimensional look.
That's how your image looks like at 100% — pretty awesome
Verdict
Percolator is full of surprises. The basic options already serve interesting images, but once you discover the pro settings, you’ll have a hard time stopping.
My only gripe is with the size of the exported images. The iPhone 4S has a much larger resolution camera and therefore the original images are in a higher resolution. It would be great if down the road this original size could be kept.
But other than that Percolator is incredibly fun to use. The changes to the image are animated, the entire user interface is deliciously designed and the resulting images — well, they rock!
So, if you haven’t already, get your photo brewing. For less than a Starbucks coffee you get a universal app which will bring many, many hours of fun.