Have you often wished for an image editor app with a magic wand tool to make selective image adjustments for your iPhone or iPad? Do you long to post process your iOS device photos using more sophisticated tools like a clone tool, text tool or paint tool with adjustable brush sizes and hardness? Leonardo, a full-featured photo editor for iOS, could grant you that wish. Published by Pankaj Goswami, the recently released Leonardo is available now in the App Store at a 60% discount of $1.99 during an unknown promotion period.
The app works well whether you create a layered collage of vacation photos or a complicated selection of an unwanted background. You can even feather the edge of a background selection and invert it so only your main subject is selected for a copy and paste into a more pleasing background. You can then transform your copy and pasted selection for more realistic proportions.
Curves, color adjustments, shadow/highlight, live histogram, unsharp mask and many more options are available. If you have used layers in Photoshop, the layer blend modes and mask options will be a nice surprise. Leonardo is fast enough to handle most of the 25 photo effect presets in real-time. That means no status bar to wait on while the effect is applied. You can export your file as a .psd including layers, a .png or .jpeg. Export file resolution for iPad maxes out at 4096 x 4096 and the iPhone is limited to the resolution of its camera.
When you first open Leonardo, straight away you’re given a link to view video tutorials. View as many as possible before diving in without a life jacket. The tool names and how they function will feel familiar to you if you’ve used a high end image editor such as Adobe Photoshop. The interface works more like a Photoshop plug-in with many of the 19 filters having adjustable parameters. It will take repetition using the app to get a grasp of all it is capable of. Well worth the learning curve if you don’t want to fire up the now, rapidly becoming a relic, desktop PC. Photoshop clone? Probably not, but the closest yet.
The app is available for the iPhone, iPad – iPad Mini and the iPod Touch. Requires iOS 5 and above (iPad 2 and up).
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Nice find! I want this for Android too… even though I don’t have an Android tablet – yet. I can imagine pairing this app with the Brando OTG Hub, a mouse and a small keyboard. It would make a great light weight vacation/travel setup.
This could be the app that keeps me from going back to an Android smart phone. Miracles do happen, maybe it could be ported over to the dark side by the author. Adding small keyboard to my wishlist (:
@Leah I think having a mouse for doing photo editing would be more beneficial than a keyboard. You can use a mouse with iOS if you jailbreak it. At least that used to work… I’ll have to check around to see if there are any similar power user photo editing apps for Android. I have a vacation coming up in October, so it would be interesting to see if I could leave my MacBook Air at home.
back@you Definitely a mouse would be more helpful with this photo editor. There is a program, requires a jailbreak, called “BTC Mouse & Trackpad” that you can pair your Bluetooth mouse. My current iPhone 5 is the first iPhone I haven’t jailbroken.
This seems like an exciting app BUT is not priced at $1.99. I’ll keep checking it out for sure.
@Emendez, thanks for posting. I see at the app store the promotional period has ended and it’s back at the regular price of $4.99. It must have been a short promotion period. Sorry about that!
I don’t understand how anyone can care about a $2 price difference of one of the best apps of all time. Leonardo is bloody amazing. Or Go ahead and load up with free apps and 99 cent ones that all do the same nothing with slightly different interfaces that make you nuts with popups for games and the PRO versions that end up costing a fortune with in-app purchases. With Leonardo you get it all and much more in ONE app that has a great interface with no adds and good tutorials. Let’s talk about functionality and throw around ideas of how to get better photos. Forget about discussions about $2 that everyone can easily afford. It’s the price of a coffee. Let’s talk about why we spend more than 10 cents on a macdonalds meal. For the same price as a macdonalds meal we can get a healthy meal somewhere and be served. Two dollars is NOTHING. If anyone lost $2 they would not care for more than 10 seconds so why have discussions about it on sites like this.