Vignette App - Velvia with square frame

When I did a roundup of all the different photography-related apps available for Android last year, a commenter let me know about one that I missed called Vignette. With sales of Android overtaking iPhone and rapidly approaching Blackberry, now is a good time to take a look at Vignette and what it can do.

I’ve long been impressed with the stock camera on my Android phone but one thing that has always seemed a bit ridiculous is that you need to decide before taking the photo what kind of look or effect you want and use the relevant app. There are plenty of camera apps available but their effects can only be used with photos taken from inside the app. Not so with Vignette and for that it gets its first thumbs up. Vignette allows the user to select any photo in any photo album and process it after the fact in Vignette. That alone makes Vignette worth buying.

Vignette is available as a demo or as a fully functional paid app. The demo gives you access to all the effects but limits your phone’s camera to the smallest resolution, which on mine is 0.3 megapixel. Paying the approximately $4 unlocks the full resolution of your camera, in my case 5 megapixels.

Vignette Scary Movie effect with 35mm full bleed frame.

All told, there are 68 possible effects and 56 different frames. The options though are so much greater because it’s all customizable. You can simply go down a list of all the effects and tick the ones you want to include to come up with your own combinations which can be saved as favorites.

The possibilities are almost endless. Included effects are

• Toy camera
• Vintage
• Colour highlight
• Colour swap
• Tinted monochrome
• Lens effects
• Cinematic
• Miscellaneous
• Customise

There are also options for double exposures, time lapse, tilt shift, geotagging and more.



Tick the box to customize the effects and frames.

I’ve always thought that as good as Android is as a system, the camera apps available for the iPhone are much better. My wife has all kinds of cool little camera apps on her iPhone that do a lot more than any Android app could but now that I’ve started using Vignette, my opinion has changed. All it needs to really make it great is the same kind of social network around it that things like Best Camera or instagram have. You can still upload direct to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox etc from Vignette so that’s only a small issue. It’s available in the app market or on App Brain.




Summer effect.