My search for a camera app ends with Retrica!
Retrica, the king of filters, boasts of over 190 filters delivering a variety of shades and colors.
A photo app delivering convenience and endless fun for users
This spring, I was planning a trip, and I thought I would treat myself to a good camera for the trip. For months I tormented myself over what to buy, and summer is already here! After checking out cameras in different stores, I realized that the problem was not the camera. I may choose a good camera body, but I have no idea which of all those lenses will produce the feels that I truly want to have in my pictures. Photos that usually strike me as beautiful vary in terms of color impressions. Yes, that is right! Correction, which determines “color impression,” is more important than the camera and lens!
This is why I decided to try different camera apps that offer filters of varying impressions and find my style. I thought it was a far better deal than spending a large sum of money on a camera when I am clueless about cameras. So, I downloaded different camera apps and took photos of whatever strikes my eyes as pretty – a pleasant walk to work in the morning, a bowl of delicious lunch, streetlights greeting me on my way back home in the evening, and the interior designs of a café that I visit with a friend.
After days of using various camera apps, I settled down with one of them. You don’t need more than one app on your mobile phone. Retrica alone will do! All the other apps will do nothing but take up space. Retrica, a thumbnail-size app on my mobile phone is the “I just don’t like you but I love you” app that I, the Queen of Indecisiveness, chose after more than a month of trial.
All that matters is whether pictures come out great! Users, do whatever you want to do!
When I first started to use Retrica, I thought it was an American app. The hip feel that the app screen gives – it appears as if it is a camera app that Americans living in Chicago or New York would use. But it turns out that it was made in Korea! As a matter of fact, it has hit 420 million downloads worldwide. I guess that the exotic feel of the app must have worked for users around the world.
Also, you would know as you use it, but I think whoever created Retrica really loves taking pictures. Because there is nothing but features for taking and editing pictures and sharing them with other users!
When you open a camera app, don’t you usually get features or products (that the app company wants to promote) or ads in the main screen as if they are curated contents? No, that’s not the case with Retrica. It’s really clean. You can find only a photo-taking screen, filters, buttons for editing live videos, a gallery, and Insight. Retrica focuses solely on taking pretty and interesting pictures.
Maybe that’s why I don’t feel tired as much as I use other camera apps or filters, and I really feel like “it’s my camera.” What if you buy a camera and ads pop up on the screen? Wouldn’t you go back and get a refund straight away? Just as I take it for granted that I don’t get ads popping up on my own camera, no ads appear in Retrica. It is faithful to its role: taking pictures.
As many as 193 filters! How long will it take to use all of them?
When you use a camera app, you end up using two or three filters that fit your preferences. However, Retrica offers such a great variety of filters that I have not chosen on my picks yet.
At first, I thought that free filters would be enough to enjoy Retrica to the full because there are more free filters than I expected. As I got to use Retrica more often, I started to feel like using all the filters available, so I decided to sign up for an annual membership. Now I use all the filters freely. There are a total of 33 different types of filter packs, which consist of a total of 193 individual filters. Suppose you use one filter a day, and more than half a year would have already passed by the time you use all of them!
Download a filter pack, and you can use a number of filters contained in the pack. One pack has as few as three or as many as 10 filters. The filters offer a great diversity in types. Retrica is a very expressive app, offering black and white filters with varying contrast ratios as well as filters with the effect of a screen noise that you would find in an old classic movie, the effect of fading in an old photo, an atmosphere unique to a film camera, or effect of a neon sign.
Retrica keeps things simple, which fits its minimalist design style, and it even enables users to add warm and neat temperature expressions to their pictures. My room is rather dull and uninspiring. In the pictures that I take with Retrica, however, it looks great and even clean. Its interior particularly looks lovely. Different filters have different appeal, giving different looks and feels to your pictures depending on the circumstances. Let me explain this later.
The emotions expressed by Retrica’s filters agree well with me, so I have been applying diverse filters on the pictures that I had taken before I installed the app to turn them into pictures of different feels. When I get bored in the subway train on my way to work and home, I put filters on my old pictures. This is my small but certain happiness these days.
Edit photos as you take them! A “let’s live simply in this complicated world” photo app.
Retrica allows you to select a filter before you take a picture. With most camera apps, you can apply a filter after taking a picture. Suppose you have just taken a picture. Now you put this and that filter on it, but you don’t like the finished product. In this case, you are not sure if you have to take the hassle of taking a picture again, and you just get annoyed. Retrica makes it easy: you can choose the right filter before you take a picture!
There is another thing about Retrica that I admire. I can tweak videos on the fly! Simply put, I can make corrections and check results in real time as I am taking a video. Open up the Retrica app, and you will find five buttons at the top. Tap on the circular button at the center, and you can apply such features as timer, flashlight (Torch), blurring or vignetting live on the screen. When I found these features, I was so amazed with them that I pressed the buttons many times to see the effects. I said it earlier, and I say it again. Whoever created Retrica really loves taking pictures!
These are why I have become passionate about Retrica, taking great pictures of my daily routines, travels, friends, and so many more. There are many other fun features than those I introduced today, and I am planning to introduce them, together with my favorite filters, over the weeks ahead. Inspiration, which was added after a recent update, looks quite neat and great, too. The more I play with Retrica, the more fun I find in it – just like a gold mine. The more you chip away, the more gold you get. Are you still looking all over for a good camera app? Then, you might want to try Retrica!
Retrica Insight 