Fun Booth 2 Review

If there’s one feature of the Mac where my friends and family are concerned that is a huge hit, it’s Photo Booth using my built-in iSight. Even those who are the most camera shy can’t wait to sit down infront of the webcam and have their faces distorted. I’m always amazed at how well received it is.

I came across Fun Booth 2 some weeks ago which, rather than distorting your face like the built-in Photo Booth effects, gives you a whole heap of props to throw on to your head and face. The most interesting part of this is the advanced face detection so rather than placing a pair of sunglasses onto the screen and you having to adjust your position to make them look like they’re sitting on your nose, the software does that for you and if you move around, the glasses will stay where they should on your face which makes it ideal for video chatting – and for the kids who won’t stay still!

As you can see from the interface above, it’s very much like Photo Booth. The Inspector window contains all the props such as eyewear, facial hair, headwear, masks and objects. You can choose to wear one prop at a time, or combine props so you could be wearing glasses, a beard and a hat all at the same time.

When you have taken silly photos of yourself you can browse through them through the built-in Photo and Video Library which is beautifully designed and send them via e-mail, right within the application itself, aswell as send to iPhoto, Flickr or via FTP.

If you record video of yourself wearing the props then you can upload that directly to YouTube, once again right within the app.

You can even use the props in realtime when video chatting in iChat.

As yet my friends and family haven’t had the opportunity to enjoy Fun Booth 2, otherwise you’d be seeing them in the screenshots instead of the yellow guy – and believe me, face detection works much better on a human face. But, I know they are going to love it as the Fun Booth iPhone/iPod touch app was very well received when I downloaded it 7 days ago. Like it’s big OS X brother, the iPhone app has face detection and gets it spot on. From within the app you can then e-mail your photos, assign to a contact or upload it to Twitter and Flickr.

Fun Booth 2 for Mac OS X costs $19.99 but a free trial before you buy is available.

Fun Booth for iPhone/iPod touch costs $0.99/59p – iTunes link.