Comparison

SHADR vs Phosphor Press

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

SHADR

Transform photos and blank canvases into unique visual art with a variety of creative styles. Refine your creations with expressive controls and discover new directions through generative randomization. Export still images or live photos and videos.

Highlights
  • Diverse and evolving collection of creative visual styles
  • Generative randomization for discovering new directions
  • Focused controls for refining composition, color, texture, and movement
  • Still image export at native resolution
  • Live Photo and video output
  • Local projects and reusable presets
Read full description

SHADR is a creative design toolkit for transforming photographs and blank canvases into distinctive visual artwork. Explore a growing collection of styles including ASCII art, dithering, CMYK halftone, pixel stretch, fluted glass, kaleidoscope, flow fields, kinetic typography, shader art, pixel scatter, surveillance graphics, and more. Each style is a focused creative tool inside one consistent editor. Import a photo or begin from a blank canvas where supported, generate new directions, shape the result with expressive controls, and move fluidly between different visual treatments. Features: - A diverse and evolving collection of creative visual styles - Generative randomization for quickly discovering new directions - Focused controls for refining composition, color, texture, and movement - Still image export at native resolution - Live Photo and video output in supported tools - Local projects and reusable presets - Subject-aware treatments in selected tools Five complete tools are available for free. SHADR Pro is a one-time purchase that unlocks every current and future tool. Tool parameters, projects, presets, and exports are not restricted.

About

Phosphor Press

Features
Read full description

Phosphor Press turns a photograph into the kind of picture a machine would have shown you before it could show everything: a few tones, a visible grain, and hard pixel edges. Not a filter laid over your photo. The picture is taken apart and rebuilt on a palette of two, four or sixteen colours, with the dithering that made those palettes bearable in the first place. SCREENS AND PRINT Paper — dark ink on warm paper, four tones. The one to start with. Ink — the same, at two tones, for a woodcut edge. Amber and Green Terminal — the monochrome monitors, at two levels or four. Inked 256 — full colour under hard black outlines. CGA 1984, CGA Outline, EGA Adventure — the hardware palettes, matched in a perceptual colour space so four colours still look deliberate. Mosaic — your photo's own colours in big square blocks. CONTROLS THAT DO SOMETHING Pixel size, from a coarse mosaic to a fine grain. Period screen modes keep their original non-square pixels, so 320x200 looks the way it did on a real monitor. Outlines that follow shapes rather than brightness. The app segments the picture into regions and draws the boundaries between them, so a line closes around an object instead of breaking up wherever contrast dips. Even lighting, which divides out the light in a scene so a surface split by a shadow stays one colour instead of becoming two objects. Auto levels, contrast, saturation, flattening, and frame shapes from square to 16:9 with a manual crop. WHAT IT IS GOOD AT Strong shapes and clear contrast: architecture, landscapes, silhouettes, objects against a plain background, anything backlit. A photograph reduced to four tones keeps what a silhouette is made of. It is honest about the rest. Fine texture — hair, foliage close up, crowds — is what these palettes have to throw away, and portraits are the hardest subject of all. Monochrome handles them better than the colour palettes do. NOTHING LEAVES YOUR DEVICE No accounts, no analytics, no advertising, no server. The app works with the network switched off entirely. Your photos are read, converted and shown back to you, and they go somewhere else only when you save or share them yourself. FREE, AND PRO Every palette, every dither mode and every frame size are free, forever. Phosphor Press Pro is a single one-time purchase. It removes the signature from exports, adds CRT effects — scanlines, phosphor glow, aperture grille, vignette — adaptive palettes picked from your own photo, exports up to eight times the pixel size, and your own saved presets, exportable to another device.

Screenshots

SHADR4 screens
Phosphor Press4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is iOS requirement: Phosphor Press at 15.0 against SHADR's 18.0. On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. SHADR sells 1 one-off in-app purchase and Phosphor Press sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.

Scorecard1 real difference · 8 level
SHADR versus Phosphor Press: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterSHADRPhosphor Press
PriceFreeFree
Rating5.0 (1 ratings) — better—
Number of ratings1 — better—
Update frequencyEvery 2 days—
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesYesYes
MonetizationFreemium—
DevicesiPhoneiPhone, iPod — better
Requires iOS18.015.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size12 MB18 MB
Age rating4+4+
Developer伟滔 黄MICHAL ZAJIC

In-app purchases

1 purchases

SHADR

One-time1
  • SHADR Pro$9.99
1 purchases

Phosphor Press

One-time1
  • Phosphor Press Pro$2.99

Questions

Is SHADR free?
SHADR is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is Phosphor Press free?
Phosphor Press is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Do SHADR or Phosphor Press have ads?
Neither SHADR nor Phosphor Press shows ads.

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