effects

Review: Snap pictures on your Android gadget with Live Camera With Effects

This cool app will let you create great, filtered photos, but has too many ads. If you can get through the inevitable swarm of them to get to the actual camera, you can take some decent shots with Live Camera With Effects.

Before you can get to the app's camera, you have to sift through not one, but two different ad agreements. You can opt out of them if you want. Even if you don't, Live Camera With Effects will slide ads all over your phone, including the browser and status bar. As for the actual camera, it … Read more

Review: Perfect your photos with Magic Effects Studio Camera

This app inches so close to being the all-in-one photo app you need on Android. Sadly, it has some weird quirks and one glaring omission that make it just miss the mark. Magic Effects Studio Camera is still a solid editing app for your smartphone or tablet. If you like to shoot with your gadget, give it a shot.

One of the first things you might notice about this app is its layout. It's easier on the eyes than a lot of other Android apps, even though the ads it has often make some of the buttons disappear on … Read more

Review: Funny Photo Effects brings cardboard photo cutouts to your device

Funny Photo Effects offers to put your face on all sorts of goofy characters. Sadly, it seems way more interested in hitting your phone or tablet with ads than helping you laugh.

Funny Photo Effects is supposed to find your face in the photo you submit and paste it on the cutout you want. However, the facial recognition sometimes takes forever to complete. More often than not, it will tell you your photo won't work and won't even bother to try to find a face. What's worse than the app's shaky performance is the infiltration of … Read more

Review: Add backgrounds, fillers, and special effects to photos with InstaEffect FX for iOS

InstaEffect FX Free is the lite, trial version of InstaEffect FX HD--an app designed so you can quickly and easily add special effects to the foreground and background of your images. The app is simple, straightforward, and in the trial version, relatively limited, but in many ways exceeds expectations, making it a good option for light image effect editing.

When you first open InstaEffect FX Free you'll notice that it's very similar to other free image editing apps. Load an image from your library or take a new one with your camera and you can start editing it … Read more

Review: Color Effects for iPhone adds pops of color to photos but fails to make a bang

There are a ton of photo-editing apps out there, so it's hard to stand out among the crowd. Color Effects lets you add pops of color to your photos. While the app works as promised, the final results don't really knock our socks off.

Right away Color Effects greets you with ads. The app gives you the option of removing the ads, but you'll have to pay. From there, you're taken to a very plain menu with photo selection options: Photo from my Photo Library, Image Taken with Camera, and Photo from Facebook. We chose a … Read more

Fotor Photo Effect Studio 1.0.0 Review

Android photo editing apps come in all shapes and sizes, but few can call themselves "all-in-one." Fotor Photo Effect Studio tries to hold that title, but comes up a little short in one category. The photo-editing and filtering features are fine, but the app's camera is too unstable to be used.

This app lets you take, edit, and filter photos in the same app. Sadly, the app's camera produces some shockingly bad images. Despite having a cool zoom feature, the photos come out as a pixelated mess more often than not. You don't have to … Read more

Great photo effects, but substandard workflow

FX Photo Studio (iPhone | iPad) lets you edit images on your iPhone, add multiple effects, then add stylized text for a unique look. The app includes all the basic image-editing controls such as brightness, contrast, and color balance, along with cropping and rotation tools.

But where FX Photo Studio shines is in the amount you can do with your photos by selecting from an enormous number of effects. As of this writing, FX Photo Studio includes 190 high-quality effects you can add to your images. You can also combine effects for virtually limitless combinations. But while the app features a … Read more

Halo still in effect: Apple sees iPads as gateway to Macs

When the iPod first came out, Apple hoped it would help drive sales of the Mac. The reason was simple: at first, you needed a Mac to use the svelte little MP3 player. The phenomenon was dubbed the halo effect because customers would be expected to gravitate to Apple's other products.

Of course, what ended up happening instead was that Apple soon made iTunes and its music store available for Windows users, switched from Firewire to the more ubiquitous USB, and went on to sell millions of iPods, dominating both the digital music and MP3 player markets in the … Read more

Photo Collage App Maker Effect 1.0 Review

A number of applications exist to work with photos on a mobile device. Photo Collage App Maker Effect's usability problems and programming bugs make this photo application a less desirable download.

The initial download and installation of Photo Collage App Maker Effect completed quickly. There were no user instructions and it was unclear if technical support existed. The initial menu was difficult to decipher and had four small buttons along the bottom that were hard to read. When we selected the first one for background images, the program prompted an additional 20MB download, which took 15 minutes to complete … Read more

Focus Effect 1.0 Review

The large amount of photo editing software currently on the market makes this genre very competitive. Focus Effect, however, stands out among the crowd. It delivers just what it claims to deliver: high-quality images. Users will be amazed at the artistic photos that can be created with an easy-to-use mobile application.

At 6MB, Focus Effect is not an incredibly light application, but that is expected from image editing software of this caliber. Download times may be extended if the user is not connected to a Wi-Fi network, so a high-speed connection is recommended. The user interface is very clean and … Read more