Photastic Video Warper

18 Oct

Thirteen years old at publishing time of this review, Photastic Video Warper has seen a fair share of art and effects apps stocked and removed from the App Store’s shelves.

With eight years between the update before last we all thought it was doomed. The developer made an update to ensure it stayed current and ran on more recent versions of iOS. But that was already three years ago. I tested on iOS v17.

The bad news is, while I've started my tests. I’ve noticed there’s an issue with several of the sections.

There’s no splash screen per se, you’re dropped into the app with an instructional overlay and then a system dialog on top of that asking if you want to load a photo, take a new picture or use the camera live. It looks a minor mess but at least you don't have to search for the import options to dive right in.

Photo Import

The first thing that’s odd is the image you import is stretched to fit the entire screen, and there doesn't seem to be an option to change this. If you want to keep your image proportions you’ll have to pad out your image with some other app first to compensate for this.

Psychedelia is no problem

As soon as you touch the screen an effect of your image spattering into hundreds of pieces starts. By default you're in the Shatter effect.

Tapping the bottom of the screen reveals a hidden Control Strip. Four icons allow choosing effects.

One makes the image flows towards your touches, one makes small parts of the image flee from your tap points.

Multitouch is supported. I’m not sure of the limit. I got about three brushes to appear. Note that a two-finger tap brings up a circular green control for editing spin and zoom.

Liquify

This is the section I had trouble with, it seemed to be some kind of layering problem that has plagued art and photo apps on and off for a few years now. You can see things but you can’t tap on them, buttons hidden, things unexpectedly blank.

Screen recording of Photastic in Liquify mode, showing issues using it.

Touching the bottom of the screen now reveals a new set of buttons:

Touch Pull, Push, Spin, Wave, Drag, Pulse and Pen Mode.

I had to turn off Auto Restore because the image was self-healing faster than I could get to the top Control Strip to export the image.

Grid Warp

The bottom row of buttons changes Pen Mode to Smooth Distortion. All of these give variations to the textures you’ll get, but they’re not different enough to warrant examples for each one.

Live Camera

This works, and although the app doesn’t have a landscape mode as such, you can still apply the effects. To get a usable video I used the native iOS screen recording, then cropped the toolbar out, and edited the final frames turning off the control center.

Unfortunately this is where the review must cease. It had been on hold while I have been working on the Tool Much Fun series, partially because I won’t be able to fully test all the features when it has interface issues. It also crashed on me when importing some more pictures from the Photo Library. By now you should be able to determine what state it’s in and what kind of images you can obtain from it.

Final Thoughts

Unless you find fun collecting vintage apps, or still have an older device on which you could install it, I regret I can’t recommend this unless it gets updated.

Jason Cutler