Camera Genius 4.2 (for iPhone)

We last looked at Camera Genius over two years ago, when the iPhone's built-in camera was fair to middling at best. The latest version of iOS added some nifty camera capabilities, so it's a good time to revisit Camera Genius, now at version 4.2, to see whether you still need third-party software to get the most out of your iPhone photos. The app's capabilities fall into three main categories?shooting, editing, and sharing. As we'll see, this mature and capable app still adds to what iPhone's native Camera app can do in all three of these areas. But is it the best choice?

Shooting
Several of Camera Genius's shooting features add ways to snap the camera's shutter. Before Apple iOS 5, there was a bevy of apps that would enlarge or turn the whole screen into a shutter button, so that you could snap a picture while holding the phone away from your face, as when you take a picture including yourself. Camera Genius still offers this, but since iOS 5 added the ability to shoot with the Volume Up button and the iPhone 4 and 4S's front camera made it less critical. If you're using a 3GS or? lower, this app holds more value. One thing Genius offers that its rival Camera+ doesn?t: It lets you trigger the shutter with noise or as soon as the camera focuses on the spot your finger touches. Both offer timers.

Anti-Shake is another shooting assist. This doesn't actually add any stabilization technology to the iPhone's camera, but instead delays the shutter from going off until you're holding the smartphone still. In my testing, this worked quite well. The iPhone 4S's between-shot time is already pretty excellent, but Camera Genius lets you shoot three photos in as rapid succession as the camera allows, with one tap of the shutter. I found Camera+'s burst mode even more useful, though: Because it lowers the image resolution, it can take more pictures faster, but with, of course, lower-res resulting images.

One of the cleverer tools in Camera Genius's kit is the ability to separate the point of focus from the point of exposure, though I can't think of when this would be useful, and the capability is matched by Camera+. In fact, most of what I've mentioned before this, and much of the edits and effects I'll mention later, can also be found in the competing Camera+ app, which has an even more appealing design.

Finally, for the organizers, you can also stamp images with date, time, and location. The timestamp looks a lot nicer that what point-and-shoots are known for, with an attractive, understated white font. It's something not offered by the competition we tested, so if this appeals to you, Camera Genius is a good choice.

One shooting option that the built-in iPhone Camera app can boast but Camera Genius lacks is HDR. Though the Apple version of HDR is far from ideal, often making photos blurrier and seldom yielding and impressive result, it's still an omission on CodeGoo's part. CG does have an after-the-face Pseudo HDR effect, but that didn't do much for my test images.

Editing
Camera Genius brings all the image adjustment options we've come to expect from even rudimentary photo-editing software?cropping, brightness, contrast, colors. But it lacks more sophisticated options you find in Snapseed ($4.99, 4 stars), such as sharpening, saturation, straightening, and white balance control. Nor does Genius offer localized editing on just certain areas of a photo.

When it comes to blinging up your photo with striking effects, Camera Genius can nearly hold its own against the likes of Instagram and Hipstamatic, with options like Grime, Cracked, Lomography, Wild, and Goth. And those are just options in the Adjust settings: You get 24 more in the Effects set, including Aged, Cross Process, and Grunge. Camera+ goes it a little better in the effect department, with 27 options.

Sharing
Camera Genius offers a generous selection of sharing options. You can send photos directly to Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Twitter, or Tumblr (Camera+ subtracts Picasa and Tumblr from that list). But when I posted a picture to Flickr, it arrived with a long ugly number as the photo title.? Nevertheless, these sharing capabilities alone could make Camera Genius worth buying: The native iPhone Camera app only lets you e-mail or send to Twitter, which is hardly the top online photo sharing option. But for sharing, it's hard to beat Instagram, which boasts its own immersive social network and links to the other major ones.

Is Camera Genius a Smart Choice?
What I really wish a camera app would do for the iPhone is let you set ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. Then it could really be a point-and-shoot replacement. Apple apparently hasn't made these settings available to app developers. Pity. Till these come, Camera Genius can definitely add to the process of shooting photos and fancying them up afterwards. On the latter step, though, our Editors' Choice, Snapseed from Nik, offers more options and more control, as does Camera+, which offers nearly all the shooting features of Camera Genius in a slightly better interface and more embellishment choices.

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