Perfectly Clear for Android was announced about a week ago from this posting. We’ve previously reviewed the Lightroom Plug-In, and when the Android version was announced, I thought to myself, “This is probably the perfect platform for it.” Why? Well, no phone shoots RAW, and one has to understand that an app can only take your photos so far but it will possibly dramatically improve those from a phone.
In many ways, one can describe Perfectly Clear as the Anti-Instagram: no vintage filters to warm your heart up but instead highly processed algorithms to help give you better photos.
Right?
Interface
Perfectly Clear’s interface is a tad frustrating but beautiful and intuitive at the same time. Loading up the app can take a bit of time. When booting it up, the user has the option to either choose a photo from their phone’s gallery or snap a new one. Once selected, Perfectly Clear will analyze the photo and try to edit it to what it thinks is the absolute best.
The user can then go along with it or use different features like fixing the tint, the darks, applying a preset that they’ve previously saved after some use, or beautifying the image (which basically is a total auto fix.)
You can also unlock even more potential and fix the sharpness, exposures, skin tones and even more. There are options for packages that can be unlocked to fix things like skin blemishes, smoothing out, etc.
When you’re all done, you can share the photo to Facebook and Twitter as well as save it on your device. If selected, you can even see how much processing power your phone is using to accomplish the tasks.
First Impressions
Perfectly Clear lets a user take an image that they’ve shot with their phone (or uploaded to it via Eye-Fi Direct) and then it will retouch the image for you using its own processes.
Once the image is processed, the user can flip back and forth between Perfectly Clear’s version of the image and the original. The interface and usability to do this is really quite beautiful.
At the time of my writing this post, I’m currently on my third download and the app has crashed a couple of times on me while trying to make fixes. Additionally, it still hasn’t successfully synced with Facebook for me.
I’m using an HTC One S, which has a stellar camera and screen; though it cannot be outdone by the HTC One X. Where the One S triumphs is in processing power; and indeed the phone processes my images very quickly.
In its current stage, Perfectly Clear is a bit difficult to use and I personally prefer the standard Android image editor (which is highly underrated) or Instagram’s interface. My biggest gripe though has to do with the fact that I can’t enlarge the images that I’m editing on the screen. If I could do this, then I could clearly see that the images down below have been oversharpened. To begin with, I purposely chose images that I knew weren’t the best to begin with to give it a real test. However, I feel that Perfectly Clear should unlock the hidden functions that cost extra. If they did, this app would be rock solid. So far though, it does a pretty good job if you’re uploading and sharing a scene straight to Facebook or Twitter.
If you’re a journalist that shoots a lot of images with their phone, do yourself a favor and take a look at this app.
More images will be shot with the camera and app, and more will be reported on later on.
Image Samples
