Speckle - Lens bokeh ٤+

Fun to play with. Works well about 85% of the time. Some images just give it a tough time. Pets seem to stump it often. The background often gets included or part of the animal gets cut out. Touch ups to fix this are difficult to do and not explained in the app. Also if your cat’s whiskers extend off your cat’s body in the pic you have - they are cut out and near impossible to include. No trouble shooting directions for this either.

It’s best to pay the two tiny charges to remove watermark and get all filters. You get a fun result but don’t expect Photoshop for this bargain priced toy. This is more something to use on the go or when you just want to improve a selfie or snapshot and have it available to share. You can save directly to Photos app on your iOS device.

I do a lot of high end photography but also enjoy fast fun nonprofessional snapshot apps on the side. I have not had a chance to fully experience the latest Apple editing capabilities in Photos app with my new. iPhone Pro 12 Max, so I’m not making any comparisons. Nonetheless this app seems to stand on it’s own.

Bokeh result are reasonably impressive. Selection to define bokeh zone is not like Photoshop magic wand or other high end tools but it does a remarkable job using focus templates. Navigating your steps can be confusing at first but not a major learning obstacle

You also get some very basic adjustment options and if you pay for filters, they’re not fantastic but still certainly worth the extra 99 cents I paid for $2.97 total. Get this app with the extras to add some cheap effective photo improvement while on the go or while relaxing. Easily worth the price.

Speckle is frustrating to use in many respects. The app often crashes after drawing a line to "keep" part of the image. Other times it fails to accurately recognize the lines I’ve drawn, or it will remove a previously "kept" section when I add another line. This masking feature is very buggy.

My hope for the bokeh feature was to scatter shapes but the app doesn’t appear to work that way. As far as I can tell, it recognizes highlights within an image and bokeh is added only to these areas. After trying a few different images, I couldn’t get results I was happy with. Bokeh colors are automatically chosen and the lack versatility is disappointing.

Alterations made to an image are shown in a small thumbnail before committing to the change. A larger view would be helpful. The tutorial could also use improvements as it doesn’t cover some of the app’s features. I wish I could give a more positive review :(

iPad Pro 9.7", 10.3.3