Work Hard with... "Photogene for iPad"
You work hard, and hopefully you get to play hard too. Each post in the "Work Hard with..." series will focus on at least one way that you can do the former.
Photogene for iPad is an photo editing program that has been designed for touch interface of the iPad. With it you can browse, crop, edit, make adjustments, and then export your images either back into your iPad photos or push it up to various external sources including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, FTP, and more.
If you have never used your iPad for photo editing, one of the first things that will jump out at you is how intuitive most of the functions are to the format. For example, when cropping an image (as pictured above), you drag the control-points of the crop area to your liking (the exact resolution of your cropped space dynamically adjusts as you change its size) and press the CROP button and immediately that section becomes your new image. You can then continue to make tweaks to it until you are satisfied, and then export it. When exporting your given the option to adjust the size/resolution further, in case your trying to conserve space and would like a smaller image output.
Your options for sharing your images is one area where Photogene really shines over the competition like snapseed (iPad App of the Year 2011), which supports exporting photos to email, print, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter. Photogene gives you all of these while also adding support for a custom FTP location, Dropbox, Picasa, as well as allowing you to copy it to your clipboard. The UI and design of snapseed is admittedly slicker than that of Photogene, but when it comes to the capabilities where it counts, Photogene is the clear winner.
Another area where I feel Photogene really shines is in extra features like the ability to retouch your photos with "Heal" (which will help hide blemishes and rough content transitions and "Red Eyes", which from my experience is extremely effective at quickly eliminating the dreaded red-eye effect that is common in personal snapshots.
While the app itself is $2.99, there are three In-App purchase options that extend the product in various ways. If you are a professional media developer who finds themselves frequently using Photogene, the "GO-PRO" option ($7.99) allows for a lot of specific features that may be attractive to you, such as the ability to add personal watermarks, JPEG export quality control, the ability to define your own IPTC sets and more.
I think it's fair to say that most media professionals are not going to replace their desktop/laptop tools of the trade with an app that costs 1/10th (or more) the price and runs on their iPad, however it is a very powerful app that may allow certain tasks to be done with a few taps of your finger while on the go.