There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles in new photography iPhone app Percolator (99 cents), but it serves up its purpose—to turn your photos into multi-colored mosaics—fast and fresh.
Choose an existing photo or take a new one through the app and Percolator will grind the beans, boil the water and percolate a new image comprised of circles of color. Once your mosaic is brewed, you can choose to have it served black—the spaces appear dark—or light and sweet, where the gaps appear in white. Depending on the color composition of your image, one will almost certainly look better than the other, so be sure to try both. Brewing options let users choose to retain the original image and add bubbles over it, use colored circles to tile the photo, or (my favorite), add additional rings to the colored circles to add more detail and depth. Photos can be ground at three levels—coarse, medium and fine—which determines the size and amount of the mosaic tiles.
I found that the app did not work equally well on all photos and that composition played a huge role in the final product looking anything close to the actual photo. I did have good luck creating a Percolator image of a landscape photo and managed to create a cool-looking image off an old springboard background, but dark photos of my dog just looked a big mess. Simple images with large color swaths will be your best bet, but I can definitely see Percolator providing me with some entertainment.
If you’re unsure if Percolator’s one-trick is worth a $1 download, I’d recommend checking out the app’s Flickr group [http://www.flickr.com/groups/percolator] to see what else has been brewed.
