Warp Reality With Juxtaposer, The Photo Mashup App

Want to graft a baboon head with rattlesnake eyes and tongue onto your ex-girlfriend’s body? There’s an app for that and it’s called Juxtaposer. Load two photos into Juxtaposer and you have your own pocket Island Of Dr. Moreau. The first photo loads full-size to form the base for your evil work. Choose a second photo, and it loads in thumbnail size, ready to be shaped, re-sized, and moved into position on the base. The final result can be saved and used as a base for a second round of pixel mutation.

Juxtaposer comes from Pocket Pixels, developers of the mighty ColorSplash. Both use a similar interface. Switch between erase and un-erase or between move/pan and edit with finger taps or on-screen controls. Resizing is accomplished with pinch and spread movements and the final image can be moved into position by sliding it with a finger. Tools abound. More than you will probably use and too many to describe in detail here. Besides the red fog (for editing areas of low contrast) and softening brushes familiar to ColorSplash users, Juxtaposer provides stamping ability, image-switching, a transparency tool to aid positioning, and image flipping capability. Juxtaposer will also allow multiple top images to be added to the same session and it will replace one top image with another. The ubiquitous Facebook/Flickr/Twitter post is also available directly from the app.

I found the erase function of Juxtaposer much different and more challenging than the one in ColorSplash. Erased lines have a severe case of the jaggies, requiring careful resizing and frequent use of the infinite undo function. Juxtaposer has the ability to render in 1026 pixels instead of the default 512, but the help pages warns that this slows the editing process considerably so I didn’t use it. With patience and practice, I was still able to achieve acceptably n00b-level results, but I gave up on importing that shroud-like thing that frames Brak’s head. Sorry, Brak. Hope it wasn’t a body part. Beavis was much easier; there isn’t all that much to Beavis. So, here we have a photo of what might have been at that Jersey wedding if two celebrity invitations hadn’t been lost in the mail:



Juxtaposer is a great app for quick and easy photo mash-ups, and with some practice, it can be used to create near-photoshop quality montages.