Take control with Camera 360

The Story

Android cameras come in all shapes and qualities. Some are fantastic 8MP autofocus affairs with Xenon flash and face-tracking features, while others are more meager snappers typically delivering grainy results. Camera 360 takes your phone’s normal hardware but adds a set of shooting options and image-editing tools taken from the cutting edge of photography.

The Experience

Camera 360 starts well. The tap-to-focus option makes normal shooting a breeze. If you skip past the ho-hum sepia and B&W settings in the Mode menu you will find dreamlike soft focus options, or the ability to improve exposures using a tool called HDR (albeit this is not as good as on the iPhone). There’s even a good all-purpose Enhance setting.

Exploring further yields some Photoshop-style filters that can convert your family snap into an impressionistic paintbrush affair, a pencil sketch, pop art or even apply a fish-eye distortion. These are never truly useful but do occasionally give stunning results.

Two modes that will genuinely drop jaws are tilt shift (which makes a real-life scene look like miniature model) and colour shift (which eliminates all but one eye-catching hue from any given scene).

The free version is surprisingly fully featured but the app does incessantly nag you to upgrade and this will slow you down just when you want to grab a quick shot. That said, given the modest price, you’d be daft not to do so.

The Bottom Line

Well worth trying if you’re unhappy with your mobile phone pictures – and even if you’re not

Additional info

Version reviewed: 1.0.4
Requires Android 1.5+