They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But what if you’re able to make a picture even more meaningful? Any event today can be easily documented by taking a quick photo from your phone or anything on your screen can be captured via screenshots. I’ve been using Skitch as my go-to app for adding perspective to these images. And like many other apps that got a visual refresh along with iOS 7, Evernote too launched the third version of its popular annotation and image modification tool.
Skitch 3 means business the moment you fire it up. It launches straight into the camera view, with a semi-transparent arrow at the centre. You can take a picture with the subject perfectly aligned with the arrow head, and thus avoid having to adjust its position later. You can make this arrow point to your desired position by simply tapping on the screen. Tap the Shutter button and next, you get to add text right underneath the arrow. You can also move the arrow 360 degrees and even change its length. There’s a place to add a 24-word caption at the bottom, but in the final result it appends the Skitch Logo which makes me not want to use this feature. If you want to edit an image that already exists on your phone, thumbnails of the latest few images in your Camera Roll show up right underneath, with an arrow icon that reveals the entire library when you tap it. Finally, if you just want to create something from scratch, a ‘+’ button in this menu will give you a blank canvas.
The ‘More Tools’ menu on top reveals a bunch of additional features, allowing you to further tweak the image. First, there’s an arrow tool to add more pointers to the image. You can add text or highlight a portion with a square or rectangle. Press and hold the button to reveal circular, oval and line options. There are transparent and opaque marker tools to highlight (or darken) content, textual content I suppose, in your image. You can change the color of all these elements using the color picker at the bottom-left. After that, you have labels signifying a Question, an Exclamation, a Tick mark, a Cross mark and even a Heart icon. Using these, you can convey your message without the need to write a single word. The final two tools include one for pixelating whatever you highlight on the screen; again super-useful when you want to send an image to somebody but without revealing certain contents inside it, and an image cropping tool, which isn’t a big deal since built-in Photo apps these days do that, but it’s still good to have it in the app. Surprisingly, we couldn’t find a way to Rotate an image in Skitch.
At any point of time during editing, going back a step or even forward is just a tap away with the Undo/Redo buttons on top. After all your editing is done, the share button opens up the iOS 7 share sheet to send your image via Airdrop, the Messages app, Mail, Facebook, Twitter, even save it to your Evernote account. Alternatively, you can save the image to the Camera Roll or copy it to the clipboard.
Skitch 3 has a very minimalistic interface; giving the image you want to edit the most area on-screen. All the icons use the translucent effect of iOS 7 and just roll out of view when you get to work. Skitch is a must-have app for any iPhone or iPad in my opinion. It is available Free on the App Store.