MobileMonet is like a little Win button for pictures on your iPhone. All you have to do is import an image (from Facebook, your camera, camera roll, or clipboard) and watch the app turn it into a stylized black-and-white sketch right before your eyes.
You can then choose to literally paint colour and detail onto the picture by tracing your finger over the image. MobileMonet is a ridiculously easy to use , and I love the way it can turn even mundane images into something interesting to look at.
Controls
As with ColorBlast! (East Coast Pixels’ first iPhone app), the painting controls in MobileMonet are fairly simple. There’s a hand to pan and zoom, a brush to paint colour and detail, and an eraser that hates everything the brush stands for (which is why it erases colour and detail).
Customization
A friend of mine criticized MobileMonet for being a little too aggressive in the way it applies its visual filters, and while that may be true of the default settings, I’m actually quite happy with how much you can tweak the image output in this app. Every imported image can be adjusted in terms of the amount of black and grey, as well as the thickness of the sketch lines. There is also a separate little tab devoted to adjusting the vibrance, brightness, and spread of the colours.
Adjustments are shown live as you play with the sliders, and there are also friendly undo and re-do buttons situated right at the top of the screen.
Basically, if you’re familiar with any kind of photo editing software, or even the iPhone’s Photos application, then you’ll know how to get around in MobileMonet.
Exporting
Exporting is even easier than navigating the app, since the Save button is highlighted in blue (it’s actually the only button displayed in colour). Once you’ve finished an image you can export it to SMS, e-mail, the camera roll, or upload it to Facebook. The Facebook section is the only one that actually confused me, since it presents the option to save to My Feed, My Photos, Friends’ Feed, or Friend’s Photos, and I’m not terribly sure what the exact differences between those are. All I know is that pictures published to My Photos ended up in an album entitled “MobileMonet Photos”, which worked well enough for me.
Conclusion
If it isn’t already apparent, let me spell it out for you: I like MobileMonet, and I can’t think of any reason it isn’t worth its current $0.99 sale price (or even its $2.99 full retail price). Like many of the best iPhone apps out there, MobileMonet has a highly specialized interface that “just works”, and I’ve had a lot of fun simply throwing images into the app, just to see what comes out the other side.
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MobileMonet was provided by East Coast Pixels for review on iSource. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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