Photo Editor by Aviary Review

Finding a well-designed photo editing app for Android is not the easiest thing to do. While there are many functional apps in the Play Store, more often than not they lack the polished feel of an iOS app. Photo Editor by Aviary is one such exception for Android and it’s easily one of the best free photo editors available for multiple platforms.

User interface and features
Aviary uses a minimalistic design for the interface and automatically loads the most recent picture from either your gallery or any other folders you specify. You also have the option to capture a picture using the camera button or browse through your gallery for a specific image. The settings icon on top lets you customise the app starting with the order of the effects and customisation options available for an image. For instance, if you have the habit of just cropping and adjusting the brightness and contrast, then you can group them together so you needn’t scroll through the ones you don’t use. You can select your output folder as well as mark certain folders to be monitored so images will be pulled automatically from it. Finally, you can even select the size for your final saved image. Currently, Aviary supports an image size up to 12MP. You even have the option to edit the EXIF data for your final image if you have to.

Easy to use interface

Despite being a free app, the UI is designed very well and finish and attention to details, like the animations between menus, add to the polished feel of the app.

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Performance
There’s a plethora of options available for tweaking your photo starting with an Enhance option that basically lets you correct the lighting of the image. You can choose between options like Night, Backlit etc. Moving on to the effects, you get only one batch of thirteen free filters while more can be purchased for Rs. 54 for a pack like Grunge, Nostalgia and Viewfinder. The same goes for Stickers. There’s a free pack that you can download off the Play Store while the rest can be purchased. Prices vary depending on the pack you choose. There are a lot of fun effects that you can pull off with stickers to jazz up your photo. The next few are pretty straightforward like orientation, crop, brightness and contrast. In the crop tool, we also have a 16:9 aspect preset that many photo editors don’t have, including some paid ones. You can even adjust the saturation, sharpness and warmth of the image very easily by simply turning the dial. The process is simple and the interface is very intuitive.

The final result

The next bunch of tools lets you draw, add text to your image, remove red eye, whiten parts of the image and even create a meme of your image. We tested the app on a Galaxy Nexus and it runs smoothly without any lag. Even applying effects does not take a very long time as the processing is done very quickly. Saving an image even at its native resolution is pretty quick. A feature that we wish were present is a colour splash tool that lets you colour in parts of the image you want. Perhaps we’ll see this in a future update.

Verdict
If you live to Instagram and are looking for a free yet powerful photo-editing app, then Photo Editor by Aviary is an excellent place to start. It packs in many useful photo editing tools including filters. And best of all, it’s completely free. One final feature that makes it stand out from the rest is that the developers also offer their SDK for different platforms, so you can embed this inside your own app. The app is cross platform and avilable for iOS, Android and Windows phone 7.

You can download Photo Editor by Aviary for iOS here.

Download Photo Editor by Aviary for Android here.