Create Wallpapers and Contact Photos for Your iPhone With ‘Ensoul’ for Mac

I love pretty iPhone wallpapers. The Mac App Store recently launched, and I’ve been looking for an app that will easily allow me to create iPhone-size wallpapers out of the hundreds of desktop wallpapers and hi-res photos I already have on my Mac. After a little searching, I found Ensoul by MacPaw software.

Ensoul is the perfect desktop companion for creating iPhone wallpaper and contact photos on the Mac. The app is incredibly well designed and focused. And, for a wallpaper addict, there’s enough under the hood to make it worth the $9.99 price tag.

With Ensoul, you can easily crop and create iPhone-sized wallpapers out of your already existing wallpapers and photos on your Mac. But that’s not all, Ensoul has more to offer than just wallpaper resizing…

When you open Ensoul, you are greeted by a window asking you to create a new Ensoul library. You have the option to create a retina display library, or a “classic” library to match the screen resolution of older generation iDevices.

Once you create a library, the wallpaper library preview is opened. This layout will be your workspace in Ensoul. The left sidebar contains the iPhone wallpapers you have created with Ensoul. The contacts tab is also located in the left sidebar. The right sidebar contains the photos you will be using on your computer to create your iPhone wallpapers and contact photos.

The center window displays the wallpaper you are editing inside the lock screen and home screen of a large iPhone mockup. You can easily see how the wallpaper looks inside the lock screen, but the home screen is also viewable if you slide the unlock slider with your mouse.

When you select a photo from iPhoto, Photo Booth, Aperture or another folder on your computer, the photo is automatically cropped into the right dimensions for the iPhone. There is also an iPhoto-like edit panel that has rotate, zoom, etc.

The adjustments panel allows you to change things like saturation and exposure. This allows you to create totally different effects and manipulations of desktop wallpapers you already have.

Ensoul also allows you to edit the photos for your Address Book contacts on your iPhone. With Ensoul, you can easily set your hi-res photos of friends of family to your contacts so that you will see your loved one’s photo when they call. Just like the wallpaper feature of Ensoul, you can see live previews of how your photos look on your lock screen (along with total access to the adjustment panel to play with levels).

Syncing your work to your iPhone is not as streamlined as it could be. Ensoul offers no way of directly transferring your wallpapers to your iPhone. Syncing with iTunes must occur for contacts to be updated, which is rather simple. To add your wallpapers you will need to add your work to either a photo folder or iPhoto event that’s set to sync with your iPhone in iTunes.

You can also select to sync your entire Ensoul library in the “Photos” tab of your iPhone’s device page in iTunes.

I highly recommend Ensoul for Mac. It’s $9.99 in the Mac App Store.

What do you think of Ensoul? Does it sound useful to you?