Photosynth and Fhotoroom for WP7

This week was interesting on the mobile photography sector as I took two phone apps into use: Photosynth and Fhotoroom. Here's a quick look into them.

Photosynth


A photosynth I took from Kirjurinluoto recreational area in Pori, Finland. It's easy to embed these synths to your own website if you don't want to give just a link.

First up is something people (using Windows Phones) have eagerly been waiting for: Microsoft's Photosynth that allows full 360° panorama images of the environment. This way you can capture everything you see around you in a way no regular photo ever could. Photosynth has been available for iPhones for quite some time, but now it's finally released for WP7 as well.

Firstly the bad news: on my phone the app seems to crash from time to time, in some occasions right after taking the photos for stitching, losing all the work I've just done. Secondly, the image resolution isn't quite as impressive I had been hoping for. The former is probably caused by bugs, we're talking about 1.0 version after all. As to image resolution, I'm not sure if it's there to stay or might it be upgraded in the future, when phones with more processing power are out.

The good news is that the stitching works surprisingly well. I've used Photosynth on an iPad 2 and that version had serious problem getting things right, but this WP7 version creates full 360 circles and stitches images impressively well. I've only taken few panoramas with it, so this is just my first impression. But none the less, Photosynth is free and you can easily share and save the picture into different places and locations. You can also autosave the image to your camera roll. Oh, and I love the Metro user interface of the app, it's very clear and simple to use.

Download Photosynth from the Windows Phone Marketplace for free

Fhotoroom

A regular photo filtered into a vibrant and tilt-shift blurred image. Some of the available Fhotoroom effects on the right.

You've probably heard about Instaram, the super-popular iPhone (and now Android) app that makes your dull photos into cute and neat little pieces of art. That app is not available for Windows Phone as of now, but that's where Fhotoroom steps in. I find it an extremely good substitute, there's a great amount of nice filters, effects, frames etc. And it's free! On top of that, the user interface looks lovely and it's easy to use throughout (can't say the same about their website..).

Fhotoroom also shows popular and recent images from the Fhotoroom users (a lot of self-posing girls, don't know what's with that =D ). You can easily choose to upload your photos to many popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, but you can just save them to your phone or directly to SkyDrive if that suits you the best.

You can get Fhotoroom from Windows Phone Marketplace for free