Geló

Gradients have become a lost art in iPhone photography, with almost every good editor giving you the power to swiftly apply a preset for a darker sky, sunset or vintage light leak. The flexibility in choosing how and where the effect is applied to your photo is still beyond most other apps, and Geló fills that gap in the market superbly.

Once you’ve taken or imported an image, the first interface you see is a carousel of ‘gels’. Cycle through to choose a colour, tap it, and then it’s applied to your shot. From there, using the sliders, you can tweak how the filter affects your shot. It’s in this high level of control that Geló becomes a winner. You can tweak individual colours and the position of the effect until it gives you a realistic graduation (usually for a horizon), or you can get a bit arty and create vintage looks or use different shapes to add a ‘gel collage’ effect. You can also choose how the gel effect is applied, either a tint, a solid gel (Over) or mixed into the colour palette (Add). Coupled with contrast tweaks, you can create images that look more professional than those ubiquitous one-touch filter apps that dominate the App Store.

There are 32 coloured filters available from the outset, but you can customise them and simply reset to default swatches whenever you like. Sadly, there’s no way to save off your new swatch as a custom preset so that it’s available to you after you’ve reset the swatch palette. What we really liked was the use of proper RGB values though, so if you have a favourite tint in Photoshop or iPhoto, you can simply note down those values and apply them to the sliders here. There’s no help available in the app, but the developer James Moore has written some excellent guides on his Flickr page at fotosyn.com/tutorials.