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Snap, filter, and share photos with Wood Camera

Wood Camera is an iPhone camera app with a new set of effects and tools for sharing photos on Instagram and other social networks.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott
2 min read

Have Instagram's filters begun to feel stale? If so, then give Wood Camera a go and add some freshness to your filtered-photo-sharing ways. This iPhone app (currently selling for 99 cents) lets you select from numerous filters and apply other effects before sharing on Instagram or the other usual social-media suspects.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

When you first launch the app, you are greeted with a black canvas and a tutorial. Like most apps, you can snap a photo with the app or import a photo from your Camera Roll, albums, or Photo Stream. Unlike most apps, you can import multiple photos so that you can pick and choose a photo from a set within the app. There is also a button to paste a photo should you have copied one to your clipboard. Also, when snapping a shot, you can apply one of Wood Camera's filters to get a live preview, and you can also remove the effect or select a new filter after snapping the shot.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

After snapping or selecting a photo, tap the orange Edit button to call up Wood Camera's editing tools. They are arranged across six buttons. From left to right, they are: rotate and straighten, crop, lenses, textures, tilt-shift and vignette, and frames. Lenses equate to the filters with which you are familiar if you are an Instagram user. There are 32 lenses, which gives you nearly double the filters you get with Instagram. You also have 28 textures and 16 frames from which to choose. And you are given great control; there is a slider to adjust the intensity of any lens or texture you choose.

The tilt-shift tool works in a similar fashion to Instagram's, giving you either a circular shape or straight bar to size as you wish.

As you implement the various edit tools, you can see which ones you've used because Wood Camera turns the icon from white to orange. You can also tap the fx/preview button at the top to hide the toolbar below the photo for a better look.

With your photo looking the way you want, tap the orange Done button. To share it, tap the share button to call up the options:

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

(The "Dropbox and others" button lets you open in other apps that Wood Camera supports. In my case, the others included Evernote, Cloud Photos, and Camera+.)

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

From Wood Camera's home screen of thumbnails of the photos you've imported, you can access settings to enable or disable geotagging, tell the app to copy photos snapped with the app to your Camera Roll, and have the app launch in capture mode.