To start, we upgraded to the latest version of Aviary’s excellent image editing tools. The biggest improvement is that you can now edit full-sized images! You’ll also find new editing features, an enhanced interface, and the ability to purchase additional effects packs that have been provided by Aviary’s brilliant development team.

One of the most frequent requests we receive is for more stamps. We’ve thought long and hard about how to provide the right set of stamps without overwhelming the app (we really try to keep things simple). So, we added a new “photo stamp” that allows you to use any image from your photo library.

For our more adventurous users, we also made sure that it works well with transparent PNG images. In the screenshots below, you can see that we selected a coffee cup PNG image with transparent edges. This means that you can now make your own stamps (hooray!) or simply use transparent PNG images that you find on the internet.

The folks behind Camera+ recently made it possible to integrate more tightly with their app (for our geeky readers, we’re using their App Integration API). This means that you can capture photos from within Halftone using Camera+. We’ve also integrated their sharing features, so you can now share your creations using Camera+ too.

This update also adds the ability to send images directly to your Dropbox folder. This makes it very easy to share your final Halftone photos across multiple devices.

Finally, we modified a couple default settings. We kept seeing so many photos with the default settings, that we decided to mix things up. The default paper choice has been changed from “Parchment” to “Wrinkled,” and the default setting for “Process original” has been changed to off. If you liked the old behavior, you can simply change them back.

We’re hard at work on a brand new app, and we hope to release it within the coming weeks.

In the meantime, if you have any comments or questions, we’d always love to hear from you!

We’ve made the image picker choice more explicit in this release, and we’ve removed all of the confusing language about Location Services. You will still have to approve Location Services to use the new image picker (it’s a technical issue), but if you want to use the old picker, it’s even easier now. We’ve moved the setting into the app under the Settings/gear icon in the upper-left corner. Switch it on or off at any time.

We’ve also updated the “Send to Facebook” feature so that it looks and behaves more like the “Send to Twitter” Share Sheet that Apple introduced in iOS 5 (and is extending into OS X Mountain Lion). You can now select a destination photo album when uploading images to Facebook. While we were at it, we used the new functionality to add a “Send to Flickr” feature too. We’d love your feedback.

Last, we improved a few other minor features:

• When sending images to version 2.1 (or later) of the Instagram app, Halftone now includes the bottom caption text. Likewise, for any other app that sends “Instagram-style” caption information, Halftone will notice the caption and import it.
• The “Reset” button under the Settings/gear icon now logs you out of all services (Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram). It also completely clears the Halftone image cache. Note that the Halftone image cache is automatically cleaned-up on occasion, so there’s normally no reason to do this manually.
• We added more Retina graphics for the new iPad. Halftone should look gorgeous on the new device!

As always, we hope you like the update!

The image picker was inspired by Apple’s Photos app, so the look and feel should be familiar. You’ll notice that the screen layout has been optimized for each device.

The new Halftone photo picker on iPad (left) and iPhone/iPod touch (right) makes it easy to open photos from the device, Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram.

If you prefer the old image picker, it can be re-enabled by launching the Settings app from your home screen, navigating to Halftone, and turning the “New Image Picker” setting to Off.

Version 1.9 also includes an update to the way Halftone handles image metadata (the non-visible information that’s included in an image file). If an image includes a “date taken,” it is now used as the default date for the top caption; if there is no “date taken,” today’s date is used. This change is based on user feedback. Also, photos that are captured within Halftone are now saved with date information.

The default text for the bottom caption will automatically be set for photos that are opened directly from Facebook, Flickr, or Instagram…that is, if they have a title or a description.

Finally, Halftone 1.9 is (again) under the 20MB 3G app download limit. That means that you don’t have to be on WiFi to download it from the App Store.

Let us know what you think of the new photo picker, and have fun with your photos!

After choosing “Send as Postcard,” the card can be personalized with an optional message and avatar. Then, multiple recipients and addresses can be added, and after completing a short checkout process, the postcards are ready for printing and delivery. It’s as easy as that.

We hope you love this new feature as much as we do!

Happy Holidays!

We released Halftone version 1.7 today, and it’s now available in the App Store.

One of the common feature requests from our users has been the ability to edit an image before applying captions, stamps, etc. So, starting with this release, we’ve partnered with Aviary to include their image editing functionality within Halftone (check out this nice post about Halftone on their site). This includes cropping, rotation, special effect filters, brightness, contrast, saturation, individual RGB color levels, and sharpness.

This new image editing feature is turned On by default, but you can disable it by tapping the settings gear in the upper-left and turning “Image editing” to Off. This setting applies to any image that is brought into Halftone (even from other apps).

The holidays are fast approaching, so we added a new “Santa hat” stamp that you can see in the screenshot below. To accompany the new stamp, you can now choose from a few gradients (and white) to add a little more style to your title captions. We have a big update to captions coming before the end of the year, but this is a good start.

Last, Halftone can now retrieve the “date taken” for images that come from the camera or photo album (another common user request). To access this information, Halftone needs to read the metadata that is baked-in to each image. Because this metadata can also contain the latitude and longitude where the photo was taken, iOS requires that you grant permission.

Be sure to read our Halftone FAQ for other common questions along with some tips and tricks.

Otherwise, enjoy this new version of Halftone!

So, we were delighted to see this fantastic review of Halftone (running on an iPad) from Adorama TV. Mark Wallace does a great job covering all of the major features in under six minutes. If you’re looking for a bit more detail than we provide in our short overview video, you should definitely check this out.

Thank you, Mark and Adorama!

We like to have a little fun now and then, so we present to you our 2011 Halloween trick. As we said…don’t be afraid of the dark (wink wink).

Touch or click for a full-size version.

Apple’s new Twitter support has made it much more convenient to send tweets from within Halftone. If you have multiple Twitter accounts configured, a From: prompt is displayed that makes it easy to select which account you’d like to use. You can even add location information if you’d like. Nice job, Apple.

This update also adds support for sending images to and receiving images from other installed apps. We’ve enabled two different methods to accomplish this.

The first method uses PhotoAppLink, a seamless way to move images from one app to another without any loss of quality. If you don’t have any PhotoAppLink-compatible apps on your device, there’s a handy More Apps button that lists them. The list even includes a button to purchase them directly from the App Store. Very convenient.

The second method uses a technique called Document Interaction that’s been available in iOS for awhile. Without getting into the technical details, this basically means that Halftone can send images to other apps that support Document Interaction, and Halftone can receive images from them too. One of the most common photography apps to support this is the wonderful Instagram.

In Halftone, when you choose to send an image to Instagram (using the icon shown in the screenshot above), you’ll get a list of apps that can also open the same kind of file. In the screenshot, you can see that FX Photo Studio and Camera+ are also listed. Likewise, in apps like FX Photo Studio that can also send images to Instagram, Halftone will be listed. Document Interaction is another great way to share images between apps.

The last significant change was to the icon. To better support our international audience, we needed to remove the name of the app from the icon itself and design something more symbolic and universal. We worked with SoftFacade to develop our new icon. The icon evokes the dotted halftone nature of the app’s original inspiration, and the speech balloon alludes to the comic-book effects that can be added to the images. It’s also easier to see on a screen full of apps.

Finally, we added a couple of stamps (yes, many more are coming!), and we modified some behind-the-scenes functionality to make it easier for us to release some of our future features and updates.

We hope you like the update, and thank you for supporting us!