Sofoto for Android

Even the greatest effects can be ruined when the image quality is stepped on by an app. Clearly this app is designed for the Instagram/social media crowd with its forced-to-square crop when loading an image and it's saving to 1280x1280 resolution, worthless for anything but social media, web or e-mail. The developer has missed a huge audience of users that want to maintain the quality of their original images. And that's a shame because the app has otherwise a lot going for it.

I'll admit, I like this app! The interface is nicely designed, the ability to adjust the intensity of the effect is simple to use, and the variety of filters was a surprising extra! However, this app does two things that are big No-No's for serious photographers. The first is assuming that we WANT to be forced to chop our wonderfully-composed images into a square. Not everyone uses Instagram, and even rhose who do still want to option of choosing which images to crop and which to leave alone. So minus one star for that. But even worse, this app reduces the QUALITY of your final image by a pretty serious margin. If you put in a full-quality. Photo, you'll end up with something far less than what you started with. And THAT, my friends, makes this app pretty much worthless to serious photographers until it is addressed. Don't take our photos and make them less than what we started with. Having said that, I'm not going to delete this app, like I usually do with low-res apps, because I can't think of any others which quite do what this one does. Even Snapseed can only blur images in a pre-defined area, (when using the Tilt-Shift Mode), but this app gives a nice overall softening to the image, which is perfect for portraits and even outdoor scenes which need to have a dreamy look to them. So, despite the problems, I'm going to give this Developer time to make some upgrades. And if they do, it will be a very handy app to have in your toolbox!