Paper Camera app adds cartoonish effects to photos

— -- Paper Camera is another in a long line of camera enhancement applications for Android and iOS devices that applies a variety of cartoonish effects to your photos. Whether you're after comic book inking, an "artistic" pastel look, or a pseudo-gothic effect on your photos, Paper Camera probably has an option for you.

What sets Paper Camera apart is the application's sheer breadth of options, accessed through an innovative minimalist design that looks like doodle-filled margins of your grade school notebook.

As soon as you open up the $1.99 app (currently 99 cents for iOS) you're greeted by your rear-facing camera's live view feed, surrounded by a wrinkled paper background and a few touch-controlled sliders for contrast, brightness, and "lines." Beside these are options for taking a photo, accessing a saved photo from your camera roll, and switching between Paper Camera's many filter options.

We used a Motorola Atrix 4G to test out the Android version of the app and the rendering speed was remarkably quick, with in-app adjustments and switches between filters happening nearly instantaneously. It's so quick that you're likely to get the most enjoyment by simply pointing your phone at the world around you, rather than editing any one photo. The effects are dramatic, and are all rendered in real-time quite well, making for a fun way to look at the world. Better still, the three sliders provide a significant amount of control over the app's final output.

The minimalist design of the interface is a nice change from over-done applications, but the lack of any sort of instruction or tutorial does require a little bit of hunting around the app before you know what each function does. Despite several days of investigating, we couldn't quite pin down exactly what the "lines" slider accomplished; the effect was noticeable, but it was inconsistent from filter to filter, so you'll have to experiment a lot to see its effect on each photo.

There are a few other annoying quirks: on Android, Paper Camera requires a bothersome method of backtracking in order to get from editing an existing photo to taking a new one. You hit your phone's back key, but accidentally pressing this twice brings you out of the app entirely. (Only after a short entreaty to share the app with your friends, with no option to cancel closing the app.)

We'd definitely like to see more control implemented in the future, with some in-app help, a way to switch to the front-facing camera, or perhaps some video functionality (the iOS version has this, but we haven't yet tested it). Even without those modest upgrades, Paper Camera is well worth the price in its current form for those looking to see their world in all its cartoony glory.

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To read some of Reviewed.com's reviews of other apps for iPhone and Android, check out DigitalCameraInfo.com. Reviewed.com is a division of USA TODAY.