I’ve been using the Vignette app for photography on Android ever since Dawn recommended it to me. It allows me to tap to shoot (avoiding the balky Droid X camera button) and offers a bunch of shooting options.

It also offers dozens of filters for creative photo-making, any of which can be applied either at the time of taking a shot, or later, to any photo in the Droid’s gallery. In fact, there are so many filters that I have trouble keeping track of all of them, and developers neilandtheresa (who, by the way, have an utterly charming blog and web site – and also see their official site for Vignette) continue to add more with each update to the app.

So I cheated and made myself a handy reference for the current set of built-in effects. It’s a little unwieldy to use on the droid itself, but not too bad — and it’s a big help for thinking about post-processing of photos that I’ve already shot. It includes examples of the vignette, coloring, camera and film effects styles and more. I hope it’s helpful to you. Click through for the full-size sheet at flickr.

Keep in mind that the effects can be layered on top of one another via the customizations menu, allowing the stacking of any number of treatments. This sheet doesn’t show any of those combinations.

One hint for working with Vignette: Set a favorite preset with all effects, frames and customizations to Normal/None; then you can quickly toggle from fancy-pants artistic to straight normal settings.

For the sake of completeness, here’s a list of all the effects currently in the application (note that not all simple color variations are included in the example sheet).

COMPLETE EFFECTS LIST as of Aug 21 2010
1. Normal - Generic film effect
2. Vignette
3. Portra
4. Velvia
5. Ilford
TOY
6. Toy Camera
7. Toy Camera BW
8. Leaky
9. Cross-Process
VINTAGE
10. Faded
11. SX-70
12. Summer - hazy grns and browns
13. Colourised - flat pastels
14. Oversaturated - bright washed out reds & yellows
15. Yearbook - faded B&W
16. Sepia
17. Platinotype - bright smooth tones & deep shadows
18. Retro Red - faded color variation
19. Retro Yellow
20. Retro Green
21. Retry Cyan
22. Retro Blue
23. Retro Magenta
COLOUR HIGHLIGHT
24. London - contrasty b&w and red
25. Paris - contrasty B&W and blue-green
26. New York - contrasty black & white and yellow
COLOUR SWAP
27. Red/blue
28. Red/green
29. Blue/green
30. Rotate Hue
TINTED MONOCHROME
31. Sepia - same
32. Platinotype - same
33. Bleach bypass
34. Night vision- grainy and green
35. Duotone red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta
LENS EFFECTS
36. Dreamy - soft-focus
37. Tilt-shift - portrait and landscape modes
38. Tobacco filter - deep orange tint for dramatic skies
39. Grad tobacco - portrait and landscape
40. Grad ND - portrait and landscape
41. Red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta simple filters
CINEMATIC
42. Action movie - vivid reds w/blue-green tint
43. Technicolor - red and cyan 1930s look
44. Scary movie - tri-tone blue and magenta
MISC
45. Posterise
46. Blackboard
47. Infrared
48. Rainbow
49. Negative
50. Invert
FRAMES
51. Bordered
52. Rounded
53. Oval
FRAMES - INSTANT
54. Instant classic
	variants: Wide, mini & square
FRAMES - GRUNGY
55. Instant transfer 1
	variants: 2 (smaller border) and 3 (yellow/magenta border)
56. Filed carrier
FRAMES - FILM
57. 35mm
58. 35mm full bleed
59. 6x6
60. 6x6 full bleed

It only took a few minutes with the free version of Instapaper on the iPod to make it quite clear that this is one app worth paying for.

Marco Arment sums up the app better than I can:

Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.

We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.

Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.

Simply and straightforwardly, Instapaper works in conjunction with a simple web interface to download articles or blog posts — or anything else that the handy bookmarklet can save — to your iPhone/iPod Touch, making them available offline for reading whenever the time and mood strikes.

Unlike altogether too many App Store applications, Marco offers a free version of Instapaper along-side the “Pro” version, which means that it’s easy to test out the app without making a commitment. Before a trip to Dallas a few weeks ago, I downloaded the full-featured free version and loaded it up with maybe a dozen long-ish blog posts and some other things I have been meaning to read. This process is about as simple as it gets: Click the “Read Later” bookmarklet to save any article to your Instapaper account, and then sync the Instapaper app to that account. The app will download both web- and text-only versions of the article and save them to the iPod. Later, on the plane or between meetings at that wifi-unfriendly hotel lounge, just open up Instapaper and there you find the articles:

Open one up and read away. (Instapaper Pro even saves your position so you can come and go from long articles easily)

Since it’s a bookmarklet, you can sync Mobile Safari on your Pod/Phone and flag things for later reading while you’re on the go, as well. And since the backend of Instapaper provides a web service, you can also read and manage all those articles from any web browser.

The Pro version does have some nice added features that are worth the $10 purchase price. But what makes Instapaper truly worth the money is that the developer has, in my mind, made precisely the kind of app that’s worth supporting.

About, the short version

I’m a sociologist-errant. This site is powered by Textpattern, Joyent and the sociological imagination. For more about me and this site, see the long version.

Copyright and so forth: Commenters own their own posts, and linked or excerpted material is subject to whatever copyright covers the original. Everything else here is mine, rights reserved.

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