Gadgetwise: Software for lo-fi photography

Interface screen of lo-fi to manipulate pictures taken.
If pictures do not look like crummy as you would like, there is new software that will wreck them for you.

That's not a bad thing, if you are a devotee of the movement "lo-fi" photography, which considers the effects produced by toy cameras, pinhole cameras and other devices of raw photos to be clever. There are even competitions dedicated to lo-fi.

The software, from a studio in the store of high-end photo software Alien Skin, appropriately called "Lo-fi" and promises to be "retro photography made easy".

Unlike most software filters, lo-fi, which runs on Windows PCs and Mac, will not require Photoshop or a similar product to work. Just start it and drag and drop photos to edit them.

The tricky part is that you drag the photos of what looks like a camera. Camera buttons work filters and features. It is a bit difficult to guess how to use it, so you must watch the video user guide on the website of Lo-Fi.

There are three groups of effects to mix and match. "Film color and saturation controls", "Mood" imitates different types of lenses and "Frame" changes the border of the picture and adding dirt and creases. Or you can press shuffle and randomly change images. If you would like to develop simultaneously a bunch, you give each picture a different look.

Lo-fi also has a button to save your creation or send directly to Facebook or Flickr just save it on your computer. Lo-fi software is $ 29, available for download at www.lofiapp.com.

Of course, some of some of these toy cameras do not cost more than the filter. In addition, you can approximate some effects using standard editing free photo editing software and you'll find similar effects built into some current cameras. If you use a mobile phone, as CameraBag filters offer these types of effects for about $ 2.

But if you have a hankering to transform images the camera — or photos that you've already taken — in lo-fi art, lo-fi might be worth a shot.