Review: The Photo Guide – An Extensive Photography Guide For iOS

If you’re an aspiring photographer and not sure where to start, you may get overwhelmed or confused by how in-depth and time consuming it can become. Even if you’re not new to photography, but still have yet to learn all the ins and outs there are to know, you may not know exactly where to turn to.

Luckily, there’s a comprehensive photography app on iOS that will guide you throughout the learning process. The Photo Guide ($4.99, App Store Link) by BLUE BOX takes every aspect and process of photography and brings it into one great guide to combine thorough tutorials with an easy to navigate user interface.

Overview

Even if you’ve been a photographer a while, there’s still a lot of info to learn if you’ve been trying to get that perfect exposure or focus. Not only does the app provide information on DSLRs, but it also shares capabilities of point-and-shoots as well as cameras on the iPhone and iPad. The Photo Guide helps anyone learn basics of photography to those who are seasoned photographers that want to freshen up or learn something out of their comfort zone.

Aside from all the information and basics that The Photo Guide provides, there’s some great interactive features within the app that show you how to correctly take and shoot the photos you want and expect out of your camera including ProTips, How-Tos, Lens Filters, and more.

Features

There are 14 different topics within the PhotoTips section including information to set up your camera before taking the photo, such as which lenses to choose and different configurations within your camera to depth of field, light expose and even different tips and tools on the process and steps after taking photos . As you can tell, there’s so much to learn from this app.

Even if you’re well experienced, The Photo Guide has something for everyone. Other categories within the app include How-Tos, which show you different examples of certain photos to take. Within that there are different tutorial difficulties for certain photos. The app does a great job of breaking everything down and explaining the whole process of each example and also gives you stats for each photo, such as focal length, shutter speed, and ISO.

One of the great features within The Photo Guide is that you can choose a photo from a category like How-Tos, Lens Filters, and PhotoTips; enlarge it, then interact with it by swiping back and fourth to different settings of the type of photo, and of course zooming in to see the the photo in better detail. Besides the main tutorials and extensive guide of the app, The Photo guide provides some great options such as changing the size and font of the type in all guides and marking topics as favorite or read just as if you were reading a book off of iBooks.

The app also includes a built-in glossary of photography related words that you may not be too familiar with. Another handy feature within the app is a quiz, which features 325 questions from the whole guide to brush up on your photography knowledge. If you happen to answer a question wrong, the app gives you the answer and explanation in more detail.

Overall

The Photo Guide offers so much information and content for any photographer, from the most basic fundamentals of photography to the more complex and advanced techniques; there’s almost an endless amount of content to dive into. Since the app is $4.99, the one key feature that I was expecting from The Photo Guide was the ability to watch video tutorials. BLUE BOX says there’s way more to come, so hopefully in a future update it will show up to make The Photo Guide even more comprehensive than it already is.

The user interface stands out so well, which I think is a big part of the app given how often you have to go back and fourth to different categories and through a number of topics in any category. If you’re a beginner, have been in the field a while, or even just interested in photography and don’t know where to start; look no further than The Photo Guide for an endless amount of photography topics and information.

Price: $4.99, App Store Link

Rating: 4.5/5[rating:4.5]

Pros:

  • Great user interface
  • Anyone from beginners to seasoned photographers can benefit from all the content
  • Good number of sample images in each topic, which you can also interact with and zoom into

Cons:

  • No video tutorials
John Manners

Hello all, my name is John. I live in Jacksonville, Florida, USA. I mostly review Mac games here on Mactrast. Besides working for Mactrast, I work as an in-house graphic designer. I love Apple products. I play Mac and ios games often. I also play console games. In my free time I like to work on art and listen to music. ever since the original iPod, I've been a fan of Apple. I currently get my Apple fix through a new Macbook Pro which I bought this past March, an iMac which I've had about a year and a few months, a 3rd gen iPod, and an iPhone 4. Also, various accessories such as a magic mouse which I use pretty often.