Vignette for Android

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.