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Camera360 Ultimate for Android review: Unique photo tools, if you can find them

This overwhelmingly capable camera app can do a lot. But that doesn't necessarily make it the best photo app out there.

Jaymar Cabebe Former Associate Editor
Jaymar Cabebe covers mobile apps and Windows software for CNET. While he may be a former host of the Android Atlas Weekly podcast, he doesn't hate iOS or Mac. Jaymar has worked in online media since 2007.
Jason Parker Senior Editor / Reviews - Software
Jason Parker has been at CNET for nearly 15 years. He is the senior editor in charge of iOS software and has become an expert reviewer of the software that runs on each new Apple device. He now spends most of his time covering Apple iOS releases and third-party apps.
Jaymar Cabebe
Jason Parker
4 min read

Camera360 Ultimate for Android is a photo editor with tons of fun and unique features. With it, you can make live adjustments to photos as you're taking them, or you can snap a photo and apply filters and other effects afterward. With so many features on tap, Camera360's biggest problem is its interface. Even with several hours of experience with the app, we found the overwhelming number of menus disorienting and the lack of instructions or tutorials disappointing.

6.9

Camera360 Ultimate for Android

The Good

<b>Camera360 Ultimate</b> for Android is a free photo editor featuring tons of filters, unique shot modes, and extras not found in other apps from the genre.

The Bad

The interface is harder to navigate than it should be. Basic tools for cropping and rotating photos are missing. Burst and Double Exposure modes are available for iOS, but not Android.

The Bottom Line

Even with its wealth of features, Camera360 is a tough sell because of its missing basics and difficult interface.

The feature fest that is Camera360 (pictures)

See all photos

Tons of interesting photo features
Camera360 is not your run-of-the-mill photo-editing app. It seems to focus more on high-level editing, and misses some of the more basic functions that are common to most photo editors. To give you an idea, it lacks basic crop, rotate, brightness, and contrast tools, but it has an overwhelming number of filters and different shooting modes.

One of Camera360's alternate shooting modes, called Magic Skin, is designed solely for selfies and other shots of people; it has an entire filter list dedicated to making your portraits look better, with one filter even making lips look redder (it's called "Sexy Lips"). Some of the options are supposed to smooth out wrinkles and blotches, but when we tried them out, they seemed to make skin look a little washed-out and otherworldly.

Camera360 Ultimate also has a ton of interesting filters divided up into various categories such as Lomo, Retro, HDR, and Dreamlike. Each of these categories has a handful of separate filters to experiment with, and there are artistic categories such as Ghost and Sketch. Some of these options can help add character to a photo while others like the Huge Head effect seem to barely work at all. Still, with so many options, this app does a great job of giving some variety within each category. You can apply as many filters as you want to an image, but there is no layer manager, so you should definitely be sure of your choices when you hit the Apply button. That said, using multiple filters can make for some really neat effects.

Camera360 has tons of features, but because of the confusing interface, they can be difficult to find. Screenshot by Jaymar Cabebe/CNET

Along with an enormous number of filters, Camera360 Ultimate has several in-camera tools that let you make adjustments as you shoot. Up top, next to the flash toggle and camera-switch buttons, there's a menu bar with things like focus adjustments, white balance, timer, and image stabilizer. There's even an exposure setting that can help you get a good shot while in difficult lighting situations.

Other camera modes
Tilt-shift Mode is a popular one that lets you place a vertical or horizontal bar of blur on your shots. It's easy enough to use, but it lacks the versatility of other tilt-shift-capable apps that let you also rotate and otherwise reshape your blurred areas. Meanwhile, Color-shift mode works well, as it renders your photo in black and white, but lets you pick a single color to make pop.

Audio mode is a strange option that records 5 seconds of sound as you're taking a picture. This is kind of neat for capturing the moment surrounding your photo with the sounds that were happening at the time. You can share these audio-laced photos via social-network services, but if you export through e-mail or text message, the audio will be stripped out.

Photo Splice and Puzzle Modes have a number of multipaned patterns for making collages from the pictures saved in your Gallery. You can choose up to nine photos and experiment with different arrangements and orientations.

Puzzle and Photo Splice features let you combine multiple photos in grid-based collages. Screenshot by Jaymar Cabebe/CNET

Curiously, there are a number of features in the iOS version of the app that seem to be missing from the Android version. For instance, Android users don't get the convenient Burst Mode, which automatically snaps up to 60 shots in a row. Also, the Double Exposure mode is missing, which means no layering of photos on top of one another.

Interface
My biggest issue with Camera360 is its usability. As you can see, there are a ton of different things you can do with this app beyond regular, vanilla photo editing. But the problem is, with so many options and features, it's easy to get lost navigating the interface. This could certainly be fixed with a more intuitive layout, but as it is now, we found ourselves spending an inordinate amount of time going back and forth between menus trying to track down features.

Conclusions
Overall, Camera360 Ultimate is more frustrating than it is useful. Sure, it comes with a wealth of photo filters and other special effects with which you can add character and artistic value to your photos. But the fact is that this app has some major interface issues. While using it, you'll likely spend much of your time trying to hunt down filters or features or just trying to figure out where you are. On top of these usability issues, Camera360 Ultimate lacks basic tools like rotate and crop, which, to say the least, is disappointing.

6.9

Camera360 Ultimate for Android

Score Breakdown

Setup 8Features 8Interface 6Performance 6