Video Review – Pictures Lab

The program @PicturesLab is the best photo editor for Windows Phone 7, hands down. It’s a $1.99 app, available from the marketplace. The cool thing about this photo editor, is that it can plant itself in the “Extras” menu item when you’re looking at your pictures. From there, it imports the photo you were looking at (you can also open it separately) and you begin to fiddle. For more about the fiddling, see the video review:

More details after the jump:

The quality of the processed photos is exactly what you’d expect from 10-15 seconds of processing time. It’s not stunning, but they’re fun, and they cover up what tend to be the issues with cell phone pictures anyway.

The effects menu screen has quite a few options. There are 22 preset filters, most of which have an adjustable feature, and one manual filter. The preset effects adjustment depends on the effect. For the comic effect, you adjust the quantity of lines in the picture. For the Night Vision effect, you can adjust the graininess and brightness of the photo. This is a nice touch over the generic “bleached/oversaturated” apps that I’ve used. Of course, the settings aren’t mandatory, just nice to use. There’s also a Tilt-Shift filter, which is nifty, but I don’t have any landscape pictures to apply it to.

In the full manual mode, you can adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation. I am not sure why they didn’t include hue as well, but … When in Rome.

All in all, it’s a fairly fun application. It allows you to post directly to Twitter from within the application, versus having to save>exit>open Twitter>post.

Verdict: This app is worth $2. It can clean up poorly exposed pictures, and make you look like such a hipster.

For a gallery of pictures with filters applied, click here.

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