This is the first post in a short series of Android photo editing and post-processing app reviews.

After reviewing Pixlr Express - photo editing (review), I realized what I was looking for was a photo editing and post-processing app - not just a camera app. While there isn’t as many apps like that compared to camera apps, there’s still a great selection to choose from. Among the most feature rich is an app simply called Photo Editor. There should not be any doubt what this app does.

Photo Editor is the creation of a guy calling himself dev.macgyver, but before you start accusing him of taking The MacGyver’s name in vain, I can assure you that he is worthy of such an honor: Photo Editor rivals many other (free) desktop utilities when it comes to richness in features and here’s a few highlights:

• Rotate, crop, resize, frame and clone
• Curves interface that allows fine-tuning of colors
• Drawing mode, adding text or images
• Adjust gamma and brightness
• Effects like cross process, lomo, sepia
• Frames like vignette, drop shadow and polaroid
• Easy rotation, crop or resize of photos
• Perspective, red-eye, and backlight corrections
• Easily edit with the touch and pinch-to-zoom interface
• Save images in JPEG, PNG, GIF and PDF. Flexible control of JPEG quality.
• Undo and redo
• PDF creation, webpage capture, compress to ZIP and animated GIFs

If you can think of a feature, it’s probably implemented in Photo Editor. But the apps best feature? It let’s you choose exactly what to do with the original EXIF data, meaning nothing is lost when saving an edited photo. It will even let you add, remove and update the EXIF data if you want to do that. New versions of Photo Editor is being released quite often, with 3 releases in July alone. So if there’s a feature you miss, it might be implemented soon. There is of course not guarantee that the frequency will stay this high, but frequent releases is a good sign - at least in in my eyes.

What Photo Editor lacks, however, is Pixlr Express’ excellent UI - the Photo Editor UI is created by a developer, not an interaction designer. It’s not exactly intuitive, but you will get the hang of it after a while. There are some videos on YouTube that can help you get going. Also, the app doesn’t use all available screen estate, a huge chunk at the top of the screen could have been used for something else than it currently does, perhaps merged with the row of buttons below. On the bottom the of the screen, there’s also a ad banner that takes up a lot of space, but you can remove this through a small in-app purchase. But banner or not, Photo Editor doesn’t really do a great job when it comes to utilizing screen estate well, at least not on my Nexus 5.

Ignoring the UI, Photo Editor is everything you need to cover your photo editing needs. It will take some time to get used to, but when you get the hang of Photo Editor, you’ll never need another app for this kind of work ever again.

Scan the QR code with your phone to download Photo Editor directly from Google Play.

Examples

I’ve added both the original photos and the edited versions from Photo Editor.