mac.iLounge

If you’re taking photos using an iPod touch or iPad, you almost need to add cool visual effects to your pictures to make them worthy of sharing—and there are tons of apps to do just that. Now one of them has come to the Mac App Store from MacPhun: FX Photo Studio Pro ($40) provides you with 159 different filter-style effects that can be quickly applied to any photo, resulting in dramatically enhanced colors, sophisticated explosive blurs, and other effects that might otherwise have demanded more expensive software. Best yet, the UI is very iPad-like, so it’s super easy to use.

A scrolling pane at the bottom of the screen lets you move effect by effect through the entire collection, but since there are so many, you’ll likely want to filter the filters using a hover-over sorting menu. There are enough variations on given color themes that you’ll definitely find bunches of different alternatives without doing any tweaking of your own, but sliders let you make image-specific adjustments that can be saved as presets for later use. You can also easily compare originals to edited versions and perform simple crops and rotations directly within the app. While the $40 asking price is a crazy jump over the $3 iPad version, it’s on sale for $30 as of the time of posting, and a $20 non-Pro edition is on sale for $15. The Pro version includes additional Photoshop-like editing tools for sharpening, noise reduction, and support for up to 32MP RAW images; the standard version is capped at 16MP and supports JPEGs, TIFFs, PNGs, and BMPs.