Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Distressed

I've been using an Android -based phone for a few months now; I finally upgraded from my old QWERTY phone that had treated me so well for 3+ years as part of a family-wide phone update. However, it occurred to me that I had yet to feature an app here, of any sort. So, let's change that...


...introducing: Pixlr-o-matic, part of the Pixlr family of photo editors by Autodesk Inc. (makers of AutoCAD, 3DS Max and Maya). Although recent reports of Instagram coming to the Android platform seem more believable than all the previous reports, I stopped holding my breath a long time ago. So, in my search for a similar app, I found this one.

Unlike Instagram or other popular camera apps, this one is based on post-production of an image, rather than in-camera, on-the-fly editing or manipulation. At first, I wasn't really sold on this idea, but in hindsight, I'd much rather have a 'true/clean' copy of the image that I can later layer effects on, than only having the one distressed, bordered image that I can never clean-up or apply different effects to.

It's a simple enough application to use, having three layers of effects that you can choose to apply to any photo in your gallery: colour overlays, lighting effects and borders. Each one of these layers has a number of selections from which to choose; the app has also recently added a large number of additional layer sets (e.g., soft colour overlays, fire lighting effects) that you can install, from within the app, for free. When you've decided on how you want your image to look, you can save it back to your gallery as a seperate file. This app does lack the dedicated on-line social media community that Instagram has, however, you can choose to share your finished photographs through a number of existing services.

Furthermore, if you were a fan of Picnik (on the web) previously, you've no doubt heard that it's being closed down (on April 19, 2012, and absorbed into Google+ somehow); if you like what you see in this Android app, Pixlr is on the web too and includes many more features that you can enjoy and experiment with.

It's a free, ad-free, download on the Android Market (and is also available for iOS). Go check it out!

» Found at: Android Market - Pixlr-o-matic

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