RNI Films app review.
I do a good amount of editing on my iPhone. In fact, I do A LOT of editing on my iPhone. I don’t have any Lightroom presets yet, so I like to use the apps that I have to apply a few light filters to my photos.
One of my go to apps for this is RNI Films. They are a company that makes Lightroom presets that are based on actual film. Their app has filters that are also based on actual film as well. I love this app. So I’m going to do a review of the app to give you an idea of how it works. This isn’t a review with a score at the end, but rather a review that will let you know what I love and what I think needs some improvement. So let’s dive in.
RNI Films is a free to download app. It has a few filters for free, but to unlock all the filters you will need to pay about $20 in total. I don’t know what your feelings are about in-app purchases, but I’m happy anytime a company charges for their work. When I can see an even, clear, exchange of money for services, than I know that I am not the product and the company has a clear business plan. I have unlocked all the filters.
The filters are broken up in to categories: Instant, Negative, Vintage, Slide, and Black and White. Once you choose your photo you will have the option to crop the photo or rotate it. For some reason this is the only time you can do this which is right before you start editing it. Once you choose an option and move on to edit, when you go back to crop again, you will lose your edits. I find this a little strange. I don’t know why cropping and rotation aren’t just part of the editing tools. This is probably the only photo editing app I’ve seen that does this. It’s not a big deal, but it is a head scratcher.
Once you do that you can just go through each category and tap on the filters to see what they look like. I’m not super familiar with the style of each actual film, so I don’t really know how true to the actual film they are. But either way, that almost doesn’t matter in a sense. If what you want is to just style the photo, you can choose a preset you like whether it’s true to the film counterpart or not. No one is going to say your photo doesn’t *really* look like Kodak Ektar 100.
Once you’ve chosen a filter you like you can go to their tools and start editing. Their tools are pretty basic and they have all the major tools that you could want. You can’t control the strength of the filter, but I’m ok with that. Their filters are already pretty subdued which is great.
Each editing option has a standard slider that is very easy to slide. You can press and hold on the photo to see the original photo compared to your current photo. A few of the options they have that are really useful and seem to be better than most other apps is their Grain and Dust.
Their Grain really looks great and you can control the scale as well. Their Dust option which emulates when dust would get in to the sensor of a film camera, gives you the option of black or white dust and you can press the dice to randomize it. When you combine these two options with their filters, you can really start to get some photos to look like film. Some people love the film look, other photographers don’t really like it. It’s subjective. All that matters is what you like. And I like it.
Once you’re done you have the options to share to a social network or just save to your camera roll. I just save to the camera roll when I’m done.
It’s one of my favorite apps to use to edit photos right now. There are just a few things I wish they would add though. I wish you had an option to favorite some of your filters or rearrange them so you can access your most used filters much quicker. Some of them are pretty deep in the app and can take a minute to reach. It would be great if I could just jump in to the app and immediately start to apply my favorite filters from each section. Of course there’s also being able to crop while you are editing the photo instead of having to jump back to the beginning, lose your edits, crop, and then go back to editing again. I still don’t understand that. Other than that I love the app.
RNI Films is a must-have app if you love editing on your iPhone and using filters. They are really high quality filters that can give your photos a really great look. I use the app all the time. My go to filter is the Fuji 400H. I just like the way it looks a lot, but lately I’ve been a fan of the Kodachrome 50’s. It all depends on the style of the photo. Check out the app here and let me know what you think. I’ll post some of my photos below that were editing using RNI Films on the iPhone. Thanks!
