Recreates photography magic with Swankolab

If you're one of those young people who have never experience what it is like to take pictures the 'old-fashioned' way (aka non-digital), then this app is the one that will allow you to do that, to an extent. This app not only successfully simulate the whole experience of taking photos and processing them in what you call the 'darkroom', but it also lets you get creative in altering the colour compositions of your photos. The 'darkroom', simply put, is the lab where films were taken to be processed and turned into printed photographs.

This is a nice-looking app. The whole design and execution are very impressive.  Priced at USD 1.99, I must say this app is worth every cents spent on it.

This is the main 'area' of the app. From here, tapping the 'pinned photo' area will let you upload any picture form your library. Then, on the top is a collection of eight chemicals that you can choose and mix randomly to process your picture. These chemicals can alter the colour tones of your pictures. Just swipe your finger left and right to choose the chemicals you want. As there is no way of knowing which combination of chemicals will produce what colour themes, the key rule here is to experiment and find out for yourself. The animated tube will change depending on the type of chemicals you have chosen and mixed. After you have picked and mixed the chemicals, tap on the switch on the right, which will start the photo-altering process.

You can see the whole process here as your photo literally drop into the tray filled with the chosen chemicals. There's a timer at the bottom to tell you the time required to complete the processing.

Once the process has been completed, your altered picture will appear for your viewing, where you can choose to save to your library or email it for printing. 

One useful feature of this app is the ability to save whatever combination of chemicals, or formulas, you have came up with, and rename it as you see fit. Once saved, the formula will be saved in the formula book section, where you can open anytime and choose to re-use the said formula for the next picture. This helps to avoid having to pick and mix the chemicals again and again each time you want to process your photos using the preferred formula.

Here are some photos of mine that were processed using this app.

As you can see, the end results are gorgeous. This is a must-have app for those of you who frequently edit and alter their photos for great effects.