AntiCrop (for iPhone)

AntiCrop is one of the more limited iPhone photo apps, but what it does is pretty cool: It extends your photos beyond their original edges. The technique used is similar to content-aware filling features you find in Adobe Photoshop Elements, which can fill in missing areas of panorama shots. It's not perfect, but for 99 cents, it?s a pretty fun feature to add to your iPhone photography kit.

A video, linked to from the app's home page, gives you a quick primer on how to use the app. To get started AntiCropping, you either open a photo from any of your iPhone's existing galleries or shoot a new picture?the choices are clear as can be from the app's home screen. (Other less useful prominent choices include rating in the App Store and Tell a Friend).

Once you've picked or shot an image, you have to choose the output size, from original down to Low?768x1024. The larger sizes will take longer to process, but I didn't find using the largest, original size on my iPhone 4S excessively time consuming.

Next, you see a smaller than usual view of the photo, surrounded by the typical cropping handles. But in this case, these are for "un-cropping." You drag them out, and magically, the added area is filled with content extended from what was at the original edge of the picture. So, the typical example is a beach, in which the water and sky are extended in the right places. You can choose from six portrait and landscape preset aspect ratios, like square, 4:3, or 16:9, or just freehand it. A preview button lets you easily compare your original with the new anticropped image. You can only extend a photo about a quarter of the image's original dimensions?it's not infinite. And by the way, AntiCrop lets you crop conventionally, as well, cutting off edges of the image.

AntiCrop's App Store page warns, "However please do not use AntiCrop to complete unpredictable picture areas?human face, buildings or other objects since the application was not designed for these kinds of tasks." Good advice. You might just fool some viewers with extending building textures, and I was surprised at how convincing some of my test results with backgrounds far less regular than beaches came out. But the key is that if it's an area that can be described as a "texture," rather than as an "object," it's probably fair game for AntiCrop. When you think about it, though, how often is a face right at the edge of a photo?

Sharing
After you've recomposed your iPhone photo in a pleasing way, AntiCrop lets you save it to your photo library, e-mail it to a friend, or share it directly to Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter (after the usual sign-in and permission granting). My test photo duly appeared on Flickr, with a plug for the app, but when I tried posting to Facebook I got an SSL error. When I tried posting to Twitter, the app shut down unexpectedly.?

The Antidote to Photo Boredom
AntiCrop is an impressive tool, especially given that it performs its magic on a handheld, rather than on a powerhouse desktop. While it's not perfect?I encountered a few crashes during testing, as noted?the app sports a clear, pleasant, usable interface, and for the most part yielded remarkable results. For 99 cents, AntiCrop delivers on its astonishing promise of adding content that wasn't previously there to your photos.

[App Store link: AntiCrop]

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