Face Stealer for iOS

You can do a lot with the camera built into your iPhone. Face Stealer is the newest in a long line of apps that use the power of the device and its high- quality camera to great effect, allowing you to effectively transform your face with one of a half-dozen masks. Easy to use and featuring eerie, if rudimentary, augmented reality technology, Face Stealer is a fun app to play with.

Face Stealer does one thing. It takes a photograph of someone else and layers it over your face with the front-facing camera. The effect is that when you look at the screen and make facial gestures, a different face looks back at you. Of course, it's not flawless. Try sticking your tongue out and the face distorts. Move your head to the side and it will track to keep up. But eyebrow movements, smiles, and nose scrunches all register in an almost eerily lifelike way. The app comes with a handful of built-in faces, or you can take a face from your library or from a photo you take and add it to the list.

Face Stealer works quite well for what it does. It transforms your face into that of the mask you select; it works almost instantly, without much lag time, and you can easily add new faces to the library. You can also turn down the effect and switch to video mode if you want to capture your new face. There are areas for improvement: The free app could have more built-in masks, the speed could be increased, and when creating new faces, it would be nice to have a guide onscreen telling you where the subject should stand. All said, though, it works as advertised to quickly create odd but compelling images.