Enlight Quickshot
AI-powered editing in this powerful app
Free From Lightricks, lightricks.com Made for iPhone Needs iOS 10.0 or later It was only a matter of time. With the iPhone’s camera always improving, artificial intelligence in photography was always hovering over the horizon. With Quickshot it’s finally here – an app that offers to fix your photos before you’ve even pressed the shutter button.
For example, it uses your iPhone’s orientation sensors to deskew photos before you take them, so you always end up with a level horizon. It also offers to adjust things like lighting in real time, and can apply filters before you shoot.
Instagrammers will love the deep selection of presets, but hit the individual settings button and there’s even more: shadows, highlights, vibrance, and saturation can be edited individually, as can color temperature and tint, taking Quickshot’s editing capabilities way beyond the iPhone’s stock arsenal. The final nudge into pro-level spec is the app’s ability to batch edit, applying the same fix to multiple images together.
You get other photo modes too. HDR+ is similar to the iPhone’s own, yet seems to gather more detail in taxing exposures with extreme highlights and shadows.
The Strobe mode is designed to mimic the effect of a long exposure and multiple flash bursts; the app takes multiple exposures and blends them together, theoretically keeping static elements in one place, while moving subjects appear multiple times as they move across the frame. In practice this is challenging to use, and our first efforts with surfers were less than radical. The more detail there is in the background of your strobe images, the harder using the Strobe mode seemed to be.
Quickshot is an interesting, well-executed concept. DSLR and Lightroom refuseniks will be able to conjure surprisingly good images from the app. Quickshot is subscriptionbased – $19.99 unlocks all the app’s features forever, or you can opt to pay $1.99 per month for a year’s subscription, or $9.99 to subscribe month by month. The latter option is bad value, but $20 for an app that offers near-pro editing capabilities is worth a look.
the bottom line. A flexible and powerful photo editor for your iPhone. Dave Stevenson