Summary

Amateur photographers everywhere—lend me your ears! Have you spent hours on post-production using complicated programmes such as Photoshop?
If so, and if you are fed up with spending so much time retouching photos or adding effects to them, check out our review for Photo Art - Color Effects.

Today’s review is brought to you by Paulina, a high school student.
 

Test device: HTC Desire Z
Android version: 1.2
Root: No
Runs as of: 1.6

The application is a relatively simple one, it’s purpose being to help the user add or change the colour scheme of new or already existing photos.
There are a lot of available options: black & white, grayscale, sepia, posterize, negative…

Small previews are available to give the user an idea of what the finished product will look like, which is actually very useful, as I really didn’t know what to expect from certain effects options (“laplace”? never heard of it).

Once a colour scheme has been selected you can continue editing in some detail.
For instance, there’s an option for adding colour to a part of the image (the “Painting Mode” effect), provided the picture was shot in colour and then changed to sepia or black & white. Select the brush size you want and colour in the section using your finger. The sections you select will then turn back to their original colours. This can be a bit tricky if you are looking to change small sections of the image, due to the already not very big size of the displayed image on the small screen of a smartphone. In order to work more precisely, zoom in.

Should you make a mistake or not like the outcome, hit the back button in the menu. You’ll also find the save function in the main menu.

I find Photo Art - Color Effects to be a useful app on the whole. It’s easy and fun to use and focuses on the essentials, which is adding cool effects to photos.
 

I’ve used a few editing programmes, and while I was always able to master them I often found them to be overly complex. I was very positively surprised by Photo Art - Color Effects on the other hand.
It may not compare with a professional graphics editing programme, but it suits the needs of an amateur such as myself just fine.

The first thing to do is pick a picture from the gallery or shoot a new one. The image pops up on the screen; buttons for drawing, erasing and zooming are located below.

Your finger is your number one tool: use it to zoom, draw, erase.

Photo Art - Color Effects’ menu and design are top notch in my opinion.

 

I was very satisfied with Photo Art - Color Effects' overall performance. I experienced one force close, but it was smooth coasting aside from that.

Photo Art - Color Effects can be downloaded for free from the Android Market.