The Fauxto Interface
Original photo: The Nightingale at Rotorua
The photo after being modified by Fauxto
As mentioned in an earlier post, while doing research into the viability of my project I’ve come across a service called Fauxto which implements a basic Photoshop like image editor.
Fauxto is made using a Flash 9 based interface – which automatically rules out the iPhone. I’ve visited Fauxto and played around with it a bit to find out what it can do.
It can load/save images from your PC, another website or from your Fauxto account – although they don’t provide hosting for your photos.
Features it’s implemented so far include:
- Layers (including varying blending effects)
- Selections
- Internal copy/paste (i.e. not to the system clipboard)
- Shapes (squares, circles, lines and polygons [currently only triangles])
- Filters (sharpen, blur, find edges, noise, emboss, enrich, posterize, render clouds, invert, desaturate etc)
Currently most of the options are not configurable which limits it’s usefulness to fairly trivial tasks (which isn’t necessiarly a bad thing). Although it’s interface has been modelled on that of Photoshop, so it may not be particulary easy to pick up if you aren’t already a Photoshop user.
An iPhone variation of this application would need a very different interface to be viable and there would be some issues with the speed of the network in order to do the image processing. But I don’t think either of these are major problems.