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Review: Deep – Compose Captivating Text On Photo

Deep promises a slick, easy way to create viral quote-based images for social media. But is it worth your time?

You know those motivational quote posters that show an inspiring message overlaid onto an equally inspiring photo? You’ve likely seen about a dozen of them already today across Facebook and Twitter. Well, Deep provides a simple way into that world.

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Deep has clichéd stock photos on tap

This app is designed to improve your social media game. It’s well known that posts with images tend to fare a lot better in the online world than plain text posts. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? (Or 23 characters on Twitter.)

Deep is light on features but well-presented with nice, simple controls. Start by choosing from the library of background photos. Swipe up or down on the composition to change the font, left or right to change the image filter. Tapping in any of the corners or the middle will change the text alignment and placement, while double tapping will allow you to edit the text itself. It’s a quick and visual way to edit these compositions, and though there’s little in the way of manual control the defaults are very good.

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All it takes is a quick search for ‘meaningful quotes’ and you can have a motivational image on the go in seconds

Deep comes with an impressive array of stock photos to choose from – over 1,000, in fact. Inevitably these kind of stock images cry out for a snappy slogan and more often than not end up looking like generic magazine or billboard commercials. Which is great if that’s the aesthetic you’re going for, but it’s hard to avoid. The range and quality of the snaps is great, though – so far, so good.

What’s less impressive is the inconsistency of the saved images. Although the pictures are generally nicely composed, well taken shots, once saved to camera roll the truth comes out. Some of these files are tiny: way too low-res to look any good shared online. There’s also no concern for the various image ratios that different social media sites prefer. This is a one-size-fits-all solution in a field where no platform is the same.

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Who knew advertising was so easy?

There are just a handful of filters and fonts to choose from, which would suffice if they were all great. Unfortunately though, while the filters are respectable enough for this kind of task many of the fonts fall flat – too thin to be legible, or just plain tacky.

It’s also a big shame that there’s no option to import your own pictures – just imagine the potential of displaying your wacky dog or drunk friend underneath a poignant quote about the tribulations of life and love. Or something.

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We couldn’t resist giving a classic Simpsons quote the Deep treatment. Inspirational

For more complex compositional needs or a wider variety of filters, there are a huge range of far more ‘serious’ – and better – image editing apps around. Deep is targeting a very specific niche here – sharable and ‘captivating’ text/photo compositions – and for its one purpose it’s generally pretty useful. That’s it, though.

Overall Deep is an extremely simplistic solution to a problem that for most people just isn’t there. For anyone looking to make these kind of shareable images who hasn’t already found a good way to do it, this app is for you. It’s quick, it’s easy, it gives broadly decent results. For everyone else though: Deep is actually pretty shallow.

Price: $0.99/£0.79
Version: 1.0
Size: 7.2 MB
Developer: Captain Ronan

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