The Apple iPad Review (2012)
by Vivek Gowri & Anand Lal Shimpi on March 28, 2012 3:14 PM ESTHandheld Image Editing: iPhoto for iOS
by Vivek Gowri
Alongside the iPad 2, Apple launched iOS versions of iMovie and GarageBand. Now, Apple has announced iPhoto for iOS, completing the iLife collection for iOS. Like iMovie and GarageBand, iPhoto goes for $4.99 on the App Store and makes an ideal companion for the iPad Camera Connection Kit.
iPhoto can take images from multiple sources, including iTunes, Camera Roll, iCloud, as well as pictures imported through the Camera Connection Kit’s SD card. When you open iPhoto, you’re greeted by thumbnails of photo albums corresponding to the albums synced from iTunes, the desktop iPhoto, and iCloud Photo Stream, as well as the device’s Camera Roll, images imported from the Camera Connection Kit, and a set of albums created within iPhoto for edited photos, flagged images, favorites, or pictures beamed to the iPad from other iOS devices with iPhoto. The album view is similar to iBooks or Newsstand in that the thumbnails are displayed on shelves, though instead of a virtual wooden bookshelf, iPhoto has a more modern aesthetic with glass shelves floating on a light gray background.
The other tabs are photos, events, and journals. Photos simply is all the photos taken on, imported to, or beamed to the device. Events are collections of images synced to your device from iTunes or imported using the Camera Connection Kit. iPhoto journals are a digital scrapbook of a selected set of images, arranged as a flow of differently sized elements in a digital mosaic.
From an album, event or the photo box, tapping an image will take you to the main image page, with a few buttons on the top bar. The most prominent and most important is the edit button in the top right corner, along with options for sharing, image information, and a “show original” button on that side of the toolbar, while the left side of the toolbar has an option to show/hide the thumbnail grid on the left edge, a help button, and an undo button (that only functions in image editing mode). Touching and holding the image with two fingers brings up a magnifying loupe to zoom in on a specific spot.
Entering the editing mode brings up a toolbar on the bottom, with editing tools, tagging options, and a gear that brings up secondary options. As far as editing tools go, iPhoto has most of the major ones—crop and rotate, exposure, color saturation, brushes, and various effects, all of which take up residence in 5 buttons at the bottom left corner. More general options are in the middle: auto-enhance, 90-degree rotation, flagging, favoriting, and hiding, then on the right side a settings menu that allows for selecting multiple photos, copy/pasting edits to multiple photos, and reverting to original.
Cropping is pretty straightforward, with pinch to zoom and a composition grid, as well as a few preselected crop aspect ratios accessible via the options gear. Rotation comes courtesy of a dial at the bottom of the screen, which allows you to accurately straighten your images.
Exposure controls brightness and contrast, which are combined into a slider that allows for adjustment of the dynamic range. You can control all three separately using that slider, or by pressing and holding the image, bringing up a four directional arrow that you can drag. The two different axes represent control over two different options, depending on where on the image you press. The options gear has three options: copy, paste, and, like in all of the editing modes, a reset for the individual editing mode (as opposed to the entire image). The entire editing process is very intuitive and the tactility of the program makes post-processing easy to control even for imaging novices.
The color options are pretty basic; there are sliders for color saturation, skies, grass and plants, and skin tone, along with a circle with WB for the different white balance options—as shot, sun, cloudy, flash, shade, incandescent, fluorescent, face balance, and custom, which brings up a magnifying ring to select a point of neutral color. The gear brings up the standard copy, paste and reset, but also has a setting to preserve skin tones, for keeping skin tones as shot while saturation is increased or decreased.
The brushes are the most interesting tool here, basically letting you paint on the image to edit in very specific regions. There are eight different brush tools—repair, red eye, saturate, desaturate, lighten, darken, sharpen and soften. Repair patches areas of a photo using pixels from the surrounding areas, while the rest are pretty self explanatory.
The settings and options with the brush tools are pretty endless. The most useful one is probably the edge detection setting, which lets strokes apply only to areas similar to the initially painted region—ie, if you were softening a body of water or the sky. Other options include strength and intensity of the brushes, the ability to erase individual brush strokes, having brush strokes shown as they’re drawn, and to apply the effect to the entire image. The other nice touch here is that, in addition to being able to reset all brush strokes for an image, you can reset the strokes made with any specific brush. Thus, you can reset the softening brush while not changing any edits made with the other brush tools.
The last editing mode is effects, which lets you apply a number of different effects and filters. There are six different preset effects that are displayed in a swatch book—artistic, vintage, aura, black and white, duotone, and warm and cool. Each effect has options, with artistic and vintage having different filters and the others having sliders to adjust the color or level of the filter. Some of the effects have vignetting (which can be adjusted with a pinch motion), while others have color and texture options like adding grain or a sepia tone. Effects is a fun one for the Instagram crowd, my thirteen year old brother particularly enjoyed playing with them.
The tools themselves are pretty decent in mobile use; all of the main features you would want in an editing program are there, and the simplicity of use quotient is really high. But iPhoto was unexpectedly slow on the new iPad—simple stuff like filters and color editing feel a little bit sluggish, with changes taking a beat to show up, but more complex operations with brushes feel like they take forever to happen. Just entering brushing mode takes a decent chunk of time, over 10 seconds, and the editing once you get there is far from smooth. If you’ve applied a brush tool then want to add an effect, expect things to move at an agonizing pace.
Using iPhoto, it’s easily possible to peg both cores at near-100% CPU utilization, particularly when applying a brush. This is one of the very few times I’ve felt like the iPad is CPU-limited, but a quad-core SoC would likely have been very helpful in making the iPhoto experience smoother and faster. iPhoto is available for the A5-based iPad 2 and iPhone 4S, as well as the A4-based iPhone 4. The original iPad is excluded from the list of supported devices, as is the 4th gen iPod touch, presumably due to concerns about system RAM (the iPad and iPod touch 4 had 256MB RAM instead of the iPhone 4’s 512MB), but even so, I can imagine iPhoto being terribly slow on the single-core iPhone 4.
But other than the smoothness, iPhoto is a nice tool to have at your disposal. For basic edits, iPhoto is definitely adequate, and it makes image post-processing a much more attainable tool for beginners, both in terms of ease of use as well as cost—compared to how much Lightroom or the different versions of Photoshop cost, $4.99 is almost a pittance. For serious photographers, it’s not powerful enough or fast enough for normal use, but it’s an interesting tool to quickly create previews in mobile situations. And for casual users, it excels, delivering a lot of flexibility and a decent amount of editing power literally at one’s fingertips.
Apple gave us a number of high-res photos to try out iPhoto with. We gave the originals along with a new iPad to a photographer and had her try her hands at editing on the iPad. The result of her editing work is below, hover over the links to show you what type of editing you can do with iPhoto for iOS.
| Sample 1 | Sample 2 | Sample 3 |
| Before (original) | Before (original) | Before (original) |
| After (original) | After (original) | After (original) |
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
Max brightness.Take care,
Anand
h4stur - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
I use it every day. But it don't see enough improvement in the new version, to warrant an upgrade. I view the high ress as an actual downgrade. As the machine will have to upscale the majority of the content.mavere - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
text text text text.If that means nothing to you, then the upgrade won't do anything for you. For the rest of us, this screen is a godsend.
darkcrayon - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
I'm guessing the machine will have to upscale very little content other than images on the web in a month or two. Every major app will be updated for the higher resolution, no new app will be caught dead not supporting the new resolution, and text based apps get a "free" upgrade to the higher resolution. If your primary concern is whether images on the web will be updated, then that's an area for disappointment. Otherwise...adityarjun - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
I love this site and most of the reviews. Since the ipad has been released I have been coming here 6-7 times a day just for this review. Glad to see it finally put up. I just registered here specifically to ask a few questions.While I was more than impressed with the review, I was hoping to read something about the use of Ipad as an educational tool. This section was sadly missing.
I am a engg grad student and I am currently looking for a good pdf reader. The only viable options for me are the new Ipad or the Kindle DX (the kindle 6" is too small). While the Kindle does sound good , the problem is that some of my pdf books are over 100mb and full of mechanical drawings. Will the Kindle be able to handle that, especially if i want to frequently jump pages or refer to multiple books side by side? I have never seen a Kindle in person so anyone who has used it, please comment.
Reading ebooks on my laptop is a pain. I often read through the night and that is not possible for me to do on a laptop. The vertical height is too small and I often end up turning the laptop 90 degree to read. Not to mention, carrying around a laptop in your hand is impossible for long durations. Plus the zoom options on Adobe reader are just weird. In short, I am really uncomfortable reading on a laptop. I have tried both a 14" 1366*768 screen as well as 17" 1920*1080 screen
On the other hand, ipad gives me the advantage of iOS. I will also be able to see OCW videos on the ipad as well as watch my college slides (ppt). Ipad owners please comment-- can i play .avi or real media player file on it directly or through an app? I can also use the educational apps like Khan academy plus it can serve as a note taking device. The disadvantage of the ipad is that reading on it through the night will probably leave me blind in a year or so. I have myopia and my power is -8D. That is one BIG disadvantage, or so I have read. I have never used an ipad so perhaps someone who uses it can share their experience of reading on it for hours at a stretch.
I am really confused about this so I hope the collective intelligence of this site will help me make an informed decision. And I would really like to see a page in the reviews of tablets that talk about the reading and note talking abilities and the educational purposes they can serve.
Monobazus - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
I understand your desilusion with the ommission here of any specific discussion of the advantages or desadvantages of using the iPad as a book reader. After all, that may probably be one of the main usages of the iPad, apart from browsing the web or checking the email or Facebook posts. But anandtech.com is mainly a tech site for geeks and technically oriented people, and we must understand that putting a special emphasis on specs and speeds is more interesting for the majority of its readers. For an analysis of your question, you could perhaps go into one of the various sites that deal with ebook readers. Unfortunately most of them, as far as I can tell, have not the level of expertise or care that anantech.com has in its analysis (see http://www.the-ebook-reader.com/ipad-3.html as an example).Now to your questions. I have no direct experience with the new iPad or the kindle DX. I have an iPad 1 and a kindle 3 (the one with the 6" screen and no touch controls). I haven't seen yet the new retina display of the iPad, but from what I've been reading it's much better on text than the previous editions. I doubt however that it is as good for the eyes as the eInk screens are - these are reflective and, as such, closer to paper than LCD screens. From my experience - I'm an intensive reader and use glasses, due to my advanced age - eInk screens don't put as much stress on the eyes as the emissive screens do. If you are planning to read through the night with a LCD screen use an indirect ambient light and plan for frequent periods of rest.
On the other hand, handling pdfs on the Kindle is an awful experience. A DX is certainly better than a 6" one, no doubt, because the bigger screen allows for larger type. On a 6" screen you can forget pdfs. You can't read them. If your typical pdfs can be accommodated in a 9,7" screen without zooming, then a DX can be the eReader for you. But be careful with the illustrations: I think the DX has the same controls that the 6" non-touch kindle. If that's the case be prepared for a bad experience with the illustrations, specially if they are detailed and need zooming (or if they have colour). The DX is a non-touch machine. The iPad touch controls are much better.
You can't see two documents side by side on any of these readers: not on the iPad and not on the Kindle. For that you need a laptop. On the iPad you can use a trick: open one document in one app (say, on the eBook app) and the other in other app (say, on the kindle reader). By switching rapidly between them, you can see the two documents in rapid succession. You can't do that on the Kindle. But this is a trick, a compromise, and not the same thing as looking to two documents side by side.
As to seeing ppt's and videos, the iPad is the way to go. There are apps for that. The kindle has not that capability.
In the end, my advice is this: try to get access to an iPad before buying, and see if it meets your expectations for reading clarity and comfort. Getting access to a DX before buying may be more difficult, because there are few people around with them. I have yet to see one and they are around for several years.
I'm sorry if these considerations haven't been useful for you.
Monobazus - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
See this YouTube analysis of the Kindle DX with pdf's: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVPBCD0GgBw&fea...adityarjun - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
Thanks you very much for your reply.It does seem as if neither of the two fit my needs perfectly. So I will have to make a compromise.
A 6" kindle or 7" tablet is out the question. It is just too small to read comfortably on.
The Kindle DX's screen and size seemed good to me but if you say that it can't handle pdfs comfortably then it is of no use to me. I will not be viewing any newspapers or magazines nor will I be surfing the net with it.
The only other option that remains is to use the ipad. The pros is that it should be able to handle large pdf *as per videos on youtube* as well as all my videos.
The con is the eye strain.
Is it really as bad as some sites make it out to be? Especially when compared to an e ink reader?
I will try to get my hands on an ipad and use it for a day or two but come to think of it, the screen cant be that much more stressful than a normal laptop, can it? And I have been reading reviews of the SoCs on Anandtech since morning...
Damn, I am really gonna go blind at this rate. *summons immense willpower and tries to close anandtech* * fails :-) *
mr_ripley - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
I keep and read all my technical pdf files on the ipad (textbooks, reports, memos, drawings, etc). I use an app called GoodReader which is absolutely amazing with all kinds of pdfs.Regarding eye strain, I usually keep my brightness setting at around 50% and zoom in to make the font large, which strains my eyes a little less and definitely less than a desktop screen. The sharp font on the new retina screen helps as well. That said I will admit it is not as easy on the eyes as an e-ink display.
tbutler - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
Honestly? I think the iPad's screen (even the first iPad, let alone the new one) gives me significantly *less* eyestrain than eInk, and I've owned a couple of Sony eInk readers.For me, the key eyestrain issue between the two is contrast. eInk displays are a light grey background with dark grey text, and in bright lighting the contrast is fine. But in less than bright lighting - for example, an indoor room without either a ceiling light fixture or multiple floor lamps - I start having trouble with distinguishing the text. Even a 40-year-old yellowing paperback is easier for me to read under those conditions. While you can use a clip-on reading light, I find that both clunky and less effective than it would be on paper.
The iPad (and really, any backlit LCD screen) has the 'stare into backlight' issue; but honestly, this is rarely a problem for me, and in particular it's much less of a problem than eInk contrast issues. Backlit color LCDs also wash out in bright sunlight, but not in even the most brightly-lit interior room, in my experience - however, for me this isn't a significant issue, since I spend much more time reading indoors than outdoors.
So just in terms of legibility, I'd pick the iPad (or the nook Color/Tablet) over any of the eInk readers I've used. And that's leaving out issues of software and PDF handling.