Today, the iPhone is one of the best cameras available on the Market — not only because it takes some amazing photos through the camera, but also because the apps available for it result in some fantastic post-processing on those photos and also make it easier to quickly share those photos with friends, family and followers. You’re probably more likely to come across a photo shot with an iPhone than a professional DSLR while browsing any social network feed. There are already tons of camera apps available on the App Store today, with Instagram being the most popular one. Most of these apps now let you “enhance” your photos with built-in set of filters that you can apply to your photos with a single tap. Even Twitter’s official app now comes with filters.
Today marks the release of a new app on the App Store, one that offers a different method & features for playing with and enhancing your photos — it’s called Mextures. Unlike other apps that ship with a fixed set of filters, Mextures ships with over 70 different ‘textures’ of various kinds. You can choose any one of the textures and then choose from 12 different blending options for each, which opens up a plethora of different ways that your photos can be styled with. Mextures also supports the system of Layers, so you can add one effect layer on top of another till you get the perfect desired result. This makes Mextures remarkably better than anything else I’ve tried in the past. I have been playing with the app for the last couple of days and there’s an incredible amount of tweaks you can apply to your photos using Mextures.
Mextures also lets you save your custom edits — the different layers, textures and blending modes you’ve chosen — into something it calls ‘Formulas’. Next time you want to apply the same visual style to another photo, instead of recreating the effect, you can just apply the formula and then tweak it. To help you with the concept of formulas, Mextures comes bundled with 40 different formulas from 9 photographers. No matter what kind of photo you have, these will make them look great.
Mextures is really easy to get accustomed to and works great. I love that you can actually rotate the texture and adjust it (0-100%) for every layer. This fine-graned control is often missing in most other apps. All these exceptional features are presented to you in a very beautiful & elegant dark-themed UI. When you launch the app, there’s an ‘Inspiration’ section that shows you a long stream of photos created with Mextures, or you can search Instagram or Twitter using the #mextures hashtag.
Mextures has been made possible by commercial photographer Merek Davis. It is a very solid app and a lot of fun to use. Mextures is currently available on the App Store for just $0.99. Don’t forget to check out the video below.