Camu 2.5

Every once in a while comes a product that just blows everyone out of the water. Think of the iPhone, and how it sparked the smartphone revolution. Think Amazon.com, the Nintendo Wii, or Netflix. Well, there’s a new kid on the block and its name is Camu. It’s a photography app like no other.

Built for the iPhone

Camu is a simple photography app that packs just a handful of filters and a number of key editing options all designed to come together and make a cool post out of every single image you shoot through the iPhone’s camera. It’s so fluent that you’d wish it was the iOS stock Camera app.

You swipe between filters as you shoot. It’s not a list of filters that covers a portion of the screen. Rather, the filters are automatically applied and you just slide them over your image, like overlays. It just so happens that professional photographers use pretty much the same technique, by overlapping their lens with a glass filter.

You slide up and down to adjust the filter strength, and when you’re all set you just hit the shutter button. For selfies, there’s an awesome feature that snaps the photo when everyone in the frame sits still. A 2-pic collage function also works well with the selfie mode, as shown in the screenshots.

Camu enables users to shoot videos with Live Filters, a feature that has been greatly optimized over time. This is particularly cool power to have, especially since everyone seems to love filters nowadays.

Camu’s collage creation tool is just as nifty. All you have to do is pick multiple pictures, tap the Collage button and have the app create it for you in just a few seconds.The app lets you shoot 3 and 4 picture collages and all you have to do to make this happen is tap the guide to change the mode. The tool is also easy to adapt to special light conditions, thanks to the new exposure control available to iOS 8 users. Long tapping on the viewfinder will even help you manually change the exposure point.

Thanks to iOS 8, users are able to delete photos directly from Camu, rather than having to leave the app and go to Photos. There are also plenty of new watermark styles if you want to secure your work before sharing it on the Internet.The app comes with iOS edit and share extensions, which means that you can edit and share things directly from the iPhone photos app, saving you a lot of time.

Video

The video recorder also supports filters. You simply select the one that works for your setting and start to long-press the shutter button. Recording in Camu is similar to recording in Vine. In that respect, your end video will be pretty short.

The hold-to-record idea is pretty neat, but it’s also cumbersome for when you want to take videos in motion. There’s a good chance your finger will slide off the shutter button and the clip will end prematurely.

Post editing & sharing

You can always add filters after the shooting session is over. Captions can be added to the image, and the app even suggests some awesome quotes and slogans. Captions are written in plain text with a big font that shrinks as your sentence gets longer. And the straighten function is just insane! You have to try it.

There are multiple sharing option in Camu, from Instagram and WhatsApp to Facebook, Twitter and Email. You can share images and videos securely, without any risk of someone eavesdropping on you, by using your phone number as a security token. The developers pledge they won’t share it with anyone.

Add to watchlist:

RetroCollageCamera

• Camera plus 6.2
• Photo Editor by Aviary 3.6.1
• Photo Grid 3.9.2
• Project Life 1.6
• PosterLabs 1.3.0
• Nutshell Camera 1.3
• POMELO 1.5.1

Portable version:

• Camu for Android