Fhotolens is a new Windows Phone 8 photography app that is currently in the early stages of development. It is the creation of the developers who bring us Fhotoroom and is a camera app that has an interactive, fish-eye lens effect. Fhotolens’ results go beyond the bubble effects filter by using very accurate coding that reflects curvature to the lens, giving things a more realistic fish-eye effect.
We have gotten a sneak peak at an early beta version of Fhotolens and while there are some bugs still to be ironed out and a few additional features to be added to the mix, it makes a nice first impression.
The layout of Fhotolens' viewfinder has your flash controls, settings button, shutter button and camera toggle positioned to one side of the viewfinder. In tapping the settings button a row of settings tiles will appear on the opposite side of the viewfinder that include:
- A Point EV tool (which seems to be more or less spot metering)
- An HDR feature
- A Rule of Thirds Grid
- Selection tiles for the three scene modes (macro, portrait, and scenic)
Down the center of the viewfinder is a slider bar that will adjust the amount of curvature that is applied to the camera lens. The layout is rather user friendly and lends itself to making settings changes easily while on the fly.
There also will be direct sharing between Fhotolens and the Fhotoroom app to let you easily edit and share your fish-eye photos. The integration will require an update version of Fhotoroom, which will be pushed out once Fhotolens is ready for prime time.
While the early version of Fhotolens still needs a little fine-tuning, it comes across as a quality camera app for Windows Phone 8. It will add yet another creative tool in our Windows Phone photography app library.
It is our understanding there will be a public beta available upon request once the app is more complete. We will keep you posted on how Fhotolens shakes out and when the developer is ready to take requests for the beta sign up.
