Analog – One Click Photo Enhancer

Analog – $7.99 – RealMac

When I was a kid I got my first camera – a Kodak 126 Instamatic. It took little rolls of film that came in plastic containers, each with 26 exposures. When you’d taken all your photos you’d drop the film off at the chemists and a week later you got your photos and your negatives back. To be honest, it was a pain in the arse. It was expensive and, due to the costs of getting photos developed and printed, a painfully drawn-out process. I do not miss the mechanics of film photography but I do miss the soul that those old photos had.

When Hipstamatic came out for the iPhone it was in response to the somewhat sterile photographs that the iPhone (and indeed all digital cameras) take. With Hipstamatic on your iPhone you could reclaim a little bit of that old film photography feeling, even if it was the result of carefully created effects and not the random effects of light on cellulose and chemicals on paper. Hipstamatic went on to become a phenomenon, inspiring countless clones and knock-offs including most recently Instagram.

Up until recently however there wasn’t any way of bringing those retro photo styles to your Mac and, if you wanted a Lomo or Holga look to your photos you had to use Lightroom or Photoshop. Analog from RealMac Software is the first proper attempt to bring retro photography retouching tools to the Mac desktop and more importantly to everyday users, not just Photoshop experts.

Analog comes with 20 effects built-in and 14 different frames. To use the app you simply drag your photo into the window, select an effect, choose a border and export when you’re ready. The focus is clearly on simplicity first and foremost – there is no way to alter the effects or borders – all you can do is rotate, crop, filter, border and export. If you’re the sort of person who likes fiddling with settings then this is not the application for you – if you’re the sort of person that just wants a quick and easy way to enhance an otherwise dull photo then you’ll love it.

The effects themselves are somewhat disappointing. There’s some classics in there, such as cross process, Lomo, Fuji and Holga, but none of them slap you in the face with their funkiness. Best of the bunch are Kyoto (nice light leak filter), Lomia and Noir. The borders are fairly unexciting too, with the usual smattering of Polaroid style squares and film negative embellishments. Once you’ve settled on a filter and/or border, you can export your photo, send it via email or upload to CloudApp, Facebook, Flickr or Picassa.

RealMac have endevoured to bring some variety to the filters by adding random elements to them. Light leaks appear in different sizes and locations, dust and scratches are positioned randomly and grain is applied differently each time, so it’s worth clicking on and off the same effect a few times to achieve the look you want. It’s also worth adding that’s a well written application that performs well and is bug-free.`

We’ve all come to see the possibilities of retro-styled digital photo retouching, but the problem is that apps like Hipstamatic hammered the living shit out of the concept and Instagram slammed its coffin shut. For someone with no technical expertise at all and a taste for cheesy photo effects, Analog will be a big hit. However if you’d rather your photos didn’t look like everyone else’s, or you don’t feel the need to festoon your snapshots in light leaks and bokeh (no matter how simple it is), then this is not the app for you.