Ios Review: CreamCam

Described as the “best portrait enhancement app”, CreamCam is an application that takes your self portrait and “enhances” it by removing perceived flaws by smoothing out your skin tone, removing blemishes, unwanted lines, acne and dark spots.

I’m sorry. But what a load of rubbish.

Firstly, the app is completely basic and makes you look ridiculous. All it does is blur your complexion to make it look like you have no flaws, but because you cannot manually edit certain parts of a photo, you look weird. And not natural. At all.

Besides the technical side of the app and how bad it is, I can’t believe how popular these kinds of apps are.

Spending hours on selfies and perfecting your angles to post pictures of yourself online to be judged is bad enough, but these kinds of apps take it to the next level. “Improve your selfie”, it says. “Achieve a perfect and flawless complexion”, it says. Flawless does not mean perfect, just saying.

Look, I get the appeal. It would be nice to be able to remove that pimple or those lines on your forehead in certain photographs. But this is where this app fails.

The app is automatic and requires no manual editing, so your “transformed look” is just a washout. It would be much better if you could just “fix” particular parts of photos, instead of a poster filter effect that makes you look like computerised image.

There is a brightness slider that lets you correct uneven skin tone or unflattering lighting. But that’s it. That’s the only control you can get.

Obviously not my favourite app this week.