Vintique review: Vintique

Vintique (for iPhone) is a photo editor in a sea of photo editors that give your images a retro look, but it's not quite as good as others in the category.

6.0

Vintique

The Good

<b>Vintique</b> has a lot of choices for filters, vignettes, and frames, producing good, but not especially unique results.

The Bad

Fine-tuning of basic editing tools switches to the original image, after you've already applied effects. The sliders are not fluid.

The Bottom Line

If you want to give your images a retro look, Vintique gets the job done, but there are better apps available that are less confusing to use.

To get started, like most apps in this category, you can take a fresh picture or choose one from your iPhone photo library. With your chosen image on the screen, you can use the tabs across the bottom to apply effects; make basic image adjustments for saturation, brightness, contrast, and more; choose from several vignette sizes and shapes; choose a frame; and then share the finished product via e-mail or through social networks.

Vintique has 32 vintage effects to choose from, with strange and abstract names such as "Pinky Day," "Someday," and "Dim Past." Each of the filters offers something a little different, so you'll need to experiment to find the one you want. The next tab at the bottom lets you fine-tune your images using sliders for things like Brightness, Temperature, Tint, Highlights, and others. But the confusing thing here is that after you have applied your effect, you'll naturally go on to the fine-tuning section only to find that when you adjust sliders, you're tuning the original image and not the one with the effect. Maybe the fix for this is as simple as switching the location of the two tabs, but the natural workflow in the app seems confusing to me. It's also important to point out that the sliders themselves are laggy and don't move in a fluid motion, which adds to the frustration.

Get that retro look with a little work (screenshots)

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Once you get past the filter and basic editing tabs, the rest of the features work as you would expect. The Vignette tab lets you choose from several shapes and sizes to give your photo that unique ghostly quality. There are 49 frames you can add to complement your image. Finally, you can share via e-mail, save to your library, or post your project on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or open the image in another supported app.

Overall, Vintique is not a bad image editor, but it also doesn't have much that stands out and it needs a little work before I could recommend it for download over other apps in this category.