DotMatrix Studio vs Catchlight Portrait Editor

Your photos, run through a monitoring terminal. DotMatrix Studio turns anything you shoot or import into a 1-bit artifact — the dot-matrix look of VFD displays, old newsprint and station monitors. There is no preset carousel to scroll past: you dial the look in yourself and watch it render live. SHOOT IN 1-BIT A live dithered viewfinder shows you the look before the shutter, not after. Toggle between DOTMATRIX and NORMAL if you would rather frame with the plain camera first, adjust pixel size and palette on the rail, and flip between front and back cameras. THREE FILM STOCKS NEWSPRINT — Floyd–Steinberg error diffusion, the fine scattered grain of a printed photograph. MATRIX — Bayer 8x8 ordered dithering, the regular weave of a hardware display. HALFTONE — real circular dots on a grid, with an adjustable cell size. All three are written by hand for this app and tuned by eye, not borrowed from a library. FOUR PALETTES OXBLOOD, PAPER, PHOSPHOR and AMBER. Each is a two-colour stock with its own accent, from warm terminal red to green phosphor glow. THE DIALS Virtual resolution, 80 to 480 pixels wide, is the chunkiness itself: drop it and the image breaks into big honest dots, raise it and the detail creeps back. Contrast runs -50 to +50. Halftone cell size is adjustable. Scanlines darken every third row. Press and hold the preview to peek at the original underneath. TELEMETRY FRAMES Five frames — ACQUIRED, STATION, SPECIMEN, REC, or none — stamp your artifact with instrument chrome: dates, dither codes, resolution readouts, and a caption of your own. Frame text is drawn at full export resolution, so it is never a pixel-doubled smear. WALLPAPERS Render your artifact at your device's exact pixel size as a lock and home pair, then set it from the Photos app. A LIBRARY THAT STAYS EDITABLE Saved artifacts are parametric: the source photo and every setting are stored together, so reopening one restores the whole editing session. Change your mind about a palette a month later and nothing is lost. EXPORT PNG at 2048px on the long edge. Save to Photos, share anywhere, save as a wallpaper, or keep it in the library. Saving and sharing record the artifact automatically, so an exported image is never a dead end. COMPLETELY OFFLINE There is no network permission in this app at all. No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no ads, no location. Your photos never leave your device, because there is nowhere for them to go.

Catchlight is a photo and video editor with a simple promise: your photos and videos never leave your iPhone. No uploads, no account. VIDEO EDITOR — NEW - Timeline editing: split, trim, speed, freeze frame and reorder - Titles with templates, styles, effects, animations and bubbles - Music library of free-to-use tracks and sounds, or your own files - Beat detection and Cut to beat - Sound effects made on your phone: whoosh, riser, boom, camera shutter and more - Transitions: flash, whip, light leak, zoom blur, slides and more - Cinematic filters, adjustments, canvas sizes, voiceover and on-device captions - Export up to 4K, with no watermark PORTRAIT TOOLS - Face-aware retouching: skin smoothing, blemish healing, teeth whitening, eye brightening - Reshape, age adjust, smile — subtle and always reversible - Virtual makeup, beard and glasses try-on, hair colour - Background blur, replace or remove - 67 filters, including new cinematic looks - Collages and text on photos - Batch editing with recipes: save any edit, apply it to up to 50 photos - Full-resolution export with no watermark — ever Free, with no in-app purchases. Editing works fully offline — turn on Airplane Mode and keep going. The online music library needs a connection, and it only receives your search words.