App of the week: Filmborn review

Snap happy

You can use Filmborn as a camera or an editor of shots taken with other apps. Either way, the icon-heavy interface takes some getting used to.

Spend time familiarising yourself with where everything lives and what it does, though, and the app soon becomes second nature.

Along with the usual flash and focus buttons, the camera provides access to a grid and two levels indicators (one horizontal and one vertical – the latter being handy for shooting straight up or down). The best bit, though, is the blown highlights preview, slathering your display in red if your image will look like blown-out garbage.

School days

Tapping the settings button opens the camera kit. Here, you choose an aspect ratio and lens, and then a stock from the nine on offer (three each from Fujifilm, Ilford and Kodak). A favourite set-up can be saved, and two additional slots can be unlocked via IAP.

You might think this feels a bit regimented, and you’d be right; but Filmborn isn’t about randomness and play so much as intention and education. This becomes even more apparent when you tap-hold a stock and an info page springs up, outlining strengths, weaknesses and uses for the stock, with tables about skin types, edit styles, lighting and subject matter.

Filmborn doesn’t just want you taking more photographs – it wants you to become a better photographer and, once bitten, perhaps seek out the real thing.

Close to the edit

The editor is similarly impressive. You can switch stocks, make adjustments (including a best-in-class curves tool, which is another IAP), and use crop/skew transform tools.

Integration with Photos is smart – Filmborm saves shots and edits directly to your Camera Roll, but everything is non-destructive. Revert a black and white Filmborn shot in Photos and you’ll see the vanilla photo Apple’s Camera app would have taken.

All of this is free, which seems insanely generous. Presumably, the developer’s banking on those with a more professional bent buying the IAPs, or has plans to later add more stocks to purchase.

The lack of a price-tag for the bulk of the app isn’t the best thing about Filmborn – it’s that the results you get really do look like film stock, and not like someone’s just slapped a filter on a photo shot on a smartphone.

Filmborn is available for iOS.