Vignette for Android

CNET Editors' note: The "Download Now" link directs you to the product page in the online Android Market. The application can directly be downloaded and installed on the registered Android device from your PC, or you can download it from the Android Market on your Android device.

CNET Editors' review

by: Jaymar Cabebe on July 01, 2011

Vignette is a versatile camera replacement app that's equipped with nine different shooting modes, and a huge menu of effects and frame styles to modify your photos. Because it offers options both before and after snapping, Vignette gives you a virtually unlimited number of photographic possibilities.

Before shooting, Vignette lets you choose from nine different shooting modes: Normal, Blind, Fast shot, Steady shot, Self timer, Time lapse, Strip, Grid, and Double. The Strip and Grid modes are especially fun, as they mimic the 4-in-1 prints of novelty Photobooths. And Time lapse is a unique interval shooting mode that, frankly, we haven't seen on any other apps. You can also tinker with settings like White balance, Exposure, Brightness, and Metering before going off and shooting.

Once you've snapped your pic (or imported it from your Gallery), Vignette then gives you access to its long menu of effects and frames. Just find the right combination, and you're all set. You can save a copy of the edited photo to your Gallery. If you find an Effect and Frame combination that you particularly like, you can save it to your Favourites or make a Shortcut for it on your Home screen for easy access later. We liked the combination of Toy Camera and Square Frame because of their retro flair.

While Vignette did offer tons of features to stylize our photos, we also felt it had a lot of room to improve its workflow. At times, it was annoying to constantly shuffle between the Composition screen, the Options view, the Effects menu, Hardware Settings screen, and so on. We would've loved a live-preview screen that simply let us toggle effects on and off while we watched how they affected our photos.

Overall, we think Vignette is a worthwhile download for those interested in a more feature-rich camera app. If you're looking for a quick shooter that you can fire up on the fly, this probably isn't it. The full version is available for $3.99 in the Android Market. Meanwhile, the demo version is free, but it comes with some pretty tight resolution restrictions.

Publisher's Description

From Neil and Theresa:

Random can be extremely fun to use, but it could prevent the perfect picture as well. For those who like the adventure of random but who like to play with effects yourself, we suggest saving the original. To do this, turn on the option to Save originals in the application settings screen. This will save the unedited picture in the default camera folder, as well as the photo with effect or frame in the folder you have chosen. If you turn on Take picture when screen is touched in Vignette's application settings screen, you may notice that touching the screen activates the auto focus and then takes the picture. To have a little more timing control, we recommend touching and holding the screen to activate the focus. Once ready, release to snap the picture. This helps a lot when the subject is moving in a predictable manner.

What's new in this version: Version 2011.10.26.1 has fixed effects on other Samsung Galaxy S II models.