Halftone – iPad App of the Week

Halftone – iPad App of the Week

This is a regular feature of the blog looking at various Apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive.

This week’s App is Halftone it is an universal app available for both iPad and iPhone.

Halftone adds an aged halftone-style printing effect to photos to give them a unique, vintage look. With 27 paper styles, nine built-in layouts, two caption styles, six different speech balloon styles, 24 stamps, and the ability to choose a font (including three embedded fonts), photos can be customized, then saved to the photo album, sent via e-mail, shared with friends on Facebook and Twitter, and printed.

£0.69

I do like this app, it is quick and easy to use and the results are pretty nice. What the app does is take one of your photographs and adds an aged vintage comic style look to it.

Unlike some apps there are clear instructions on how to use it.

Basically take a photograph and the app converts it into a vintage image.

You can then change the paper style from 27 different types. As you might expect some are better than others, but still some really nice choice in there.

You can choose from nine layouts and I think this is a limitation of the app as the layouts are fixed and can only contain one image.

“Stamps” can be used to “enhance” the picture and for some projects will work well.

Editing the text is quite easy, font changes are possible but not all fonts work effectively within the style of the image.

You can add speech bubbles to add more “conversation” to a picture before saving it to your iPad or iPhone or sharing it via one of your social networks.

At the end of the day this is a nice simple cheap app that allows you to create a vintage comic panel from one of your photographs in a particular style.

I would like to see more comic styles than the one included. I would like to see layouts and more editing possibilities. Of course there are other apps such as Comic Book and Comic Life that do allow you to do more, so if you enjoy using this app then check out those.

Comic images can be serious as well as humourous. They can be used as the starting point for a discussion, to emphasise the key topics in an assignment, to engage learners in a particular subject or just to break up a handout.

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