PicsPlay Pro for Android (review)

aNewDomain.net — Our Ant Pruitt recently decided to step away from his favorite photo editing apps and review PicsPlay Pro for Android. Here are the app’s pros and cons — check them out before you buy.

When I nabbed the $3.99 PicsPlay Pro app for Android, I nabbed it for free via the Amazon Android App Store in its Amazondaily app pick deal. Good thing I did.

As a paid app, PicsPlay Pro for Android let me down big time. For instance, the menu options were easy to access and fairly intuitive. There were options to adjust white balance, saturation, tilt and other typical photo editor options. But I expect more — a lot more — from a $3.99 app. Scroll below to find out why.

I liked the way the app employs sliders for adjusting things after I decided what element I wanted to enhance. The comparison option made it easy to see what my original shot looked like, which gave me a static baseline to see what my adjustments affected.

I installed these options on my Galaxy Nexus smartphone, but I wanted to take advantage of the larger screen on my Nexus 7 tablet. This was a better option, obviously. The only problem was, I had to do the editing all in portrait mode. I’d rather edit photos in landscape mode.

I flipped through the different filters and again found the kinds of filters you see in other photo editors. There were a few other cute options to add stamps and texts to the photo. Again, I found nothing outstanding here. Everything was similar to what you’d get from various other free photo editors out there.

I did enjoy leaving my mark on my shot, as you see below. That was a nice touch.

In the Google Play Store, PicsPlay Pro for Android bills itself as nothing short of incredible. It promised that, “with [a] few taps your photo will be amazingly changed … [and] you can be a professional photographer!” Yet PicsPlay Pro for Android doesn’t live up to its own billing.

Sure, the app is functional and lets you make decent enhancements and changes to your photographs. But no way is it worth $3.99. I enjoy and get just as much functionality — if not more so — from free apps like Snapseed or even the stock Android editor.

Bottom line: If you’re interested in trying PicsPlay Pro, be forewarned. PicsPlay Pro is available in both Android and Apple iOS versions. Android users ought to try the free version, though. I can’t recommend you pay a dime more than zero for this app.

Let me know your favorite paid and free photo editing apps and I’ll give them a spin.  I’m Ant Pruitt and this is aNewDomain.

Based in Charlotte, NC, Ant Pruitt is an IT pro, a columnist and the podcast captain at aNewDomain.net. Look for his Smartphone Photographers Community and Yet Another Tech Show. Follow him @ihavnolyfe or on Google+ and email him at ant@anewdomain.net. See all Ant’s articles on aNewDomain by following this link here.