Extra in-app purchases available for clipart, fonts, and ad-removal.By Michael Muchmore With Instagram, Flickr, and countless other photo-enhancing-and-sharing apps like EyeEm, Mobli, do we really need another photo social network? Though the obvious answer is "of course not," there's always room for a fun new app that does something people want. Though not quite yet a household name, PicsArt is among the most-installed photo apps in all three major mobile OS app stores. And it gets ratings of higher than four stars in all of them, so clearly it's filling some need. The app is free to install, but offers a healthy selection of in-app purchases, including a $5.99 option that simply removes ads.
Getting Started With PicsArt
I tested the app by installing it on my trusty iPhone 5. Versions are available for iOS 6 and later, as well as for Android and Windows Phone. You can start to get a feel for what PicsArt can do without even creating an account—a trait I like in any app I'm testing. On first run, a tooltip saying, "Tap to start creating," points to what I'd call a butterfly icon, which sits where the camera button usually is in photo apps. This icon is flanked by buttons for your photo feed, Explore (to see images shared by other users), Contests (more on those later), and an overflow menu.
When you tap the butterfly, you see the app's differences from the typical photo/social app: You get a four-pronged choice of editing existing images, going to the camera, creating a collage, and drawing. There's also a Shop button for fonts, clip art, and ad-free use. Happily, there are just as many free items as paid in the shop, including World Cup soccer bracket diagrams.
Editing
With the Editing choice, you not only can start with photos in your camera roll, but also those from Facebook, Flickr, and Dropbox. When getting images from Flickr to edit in PicsArt, you don't even need a Flickr account: You can browse, search, and eventually edit public photos on the service.
The PicsArt app interface is fairly well designed and powerful, though it can get busy at times because of the multitude of options. You can pinch to zoom, reveal more controls with a plus button, see before and after views of your image, undo the last action, and reset your picture to its original state.
Once you start editing an image in PicsArt, you immediately see the app's appeal: It has oodles and oodles of photo editing tools—not only Instagram-style filters that are more adjustable than those in Instagram, but also curves, masks, clone/stamp, cropping with shape, brushes, borders, text and lens flares. Photoshop, watch out! And don't even get me started about clip art. There are sets for travel, sports, nature, birthday, mustaches, baby, love, rabbits…the list goes on and on. Some are in-app purchases, usually for 99 cents, but many are free.
Drawing tools also push the app into Photoshop territory, with more than 20 brush types and shapes that transform on a 3D plane. You can adjust the opacity, size, and even the "squish" for the marker brush. You get 30 font choices for text overlays, with a color picker and font sizes from 1 to 150. You can start a drawing with or without a photo background.
Of course you also get red-eye correction, tooth whitening, stamp-and-clone, and blemish removal. The blemish tool did a good job on minor skin issues. One thing you don't get—at least not as powerfully as in Adobe Mix and Photoshop Touch—is auto-object selection and edge detection. For example, when I brushed artificial tan onto a friend's face, the brown overlay affected the background as well as his skin. The cloning tool is fun, but don't expect content-aware object removal like that in Adobe's Photoshop and Mix.
Collages
Collages: You've seen them on Instagram and elsewhere, and maybe you wondered how they were made. Collages aren't possible with most photo social apps, but, as you might expect, PicsArt offers a cornucopia of layouts, borders, and backgrounds for collage creation, as you can see from the image below.
Sharing
The app's wealth of editing tools means you can put serious time into working on an image. You can save the picture to the Camera Roll at any point with a button tap, but naturally you'll want to share that work with others, and the app is by no means deficient in sharing options. Facebook and Twitter direct sharing are options, and when uploading to PicsArt's own service you have options to simultaneously share to Flickr, Tumblr, and DeviantArt. The Export option adds Instagram, as well as any app you have that accepts photos as input.
If you have Instagram blinders on, you may not have noticed PicsArt's surprisingly active photo-sharing community. I'm always amazed at how often new social services can come along and still manage to build up a decent quorum of users. That said, its community is still dwarfed by those of Flickr and Instagram. When uploading an image, you can add keyword tags and location, specify whether the photo should be private or public (the default), and specify whether it includes mature content (a toggle lets you view mature content, but it's off by default).
The app—and the PicsArt website for that matter—allow all the standard social networking activities—commenting, favoriting, and following. The interface is well-done and intuitive, making good use of swipe gestures, though it's not going to win any innovation prizes. When you first "heart" a photo, you're asked whether to share that fact to Facebook. Thankfully, you can turn this off.
Contests are a nice plus from PicsArt, and they make sense, given the numerous creative tools the app offers. The users vote, and the winners are highlighted on PicsArt's blog.
The Formula of PicsArt's Success
PicsArt takes just about the opposite approach to photo enhancing from what Instagram does. Where the latter stresses simplicity, PicsArt offers vastly more image-editing options. Not only are its filters more adjustable, but it offers near-Photoshop-level tools like layers, clone stamp, curves, and masks. Drawing tools and clip art make it far more than just a photo app. All of this, however, comes with a risk of gaudy pictures, which Instagram does a good job of preventing by limiting the options and the extent to which those limited options can affect images.
Those who love to tinker with photos on their phones and jazz them up to the hilt should immediately dump Instagram for PicsArt. Or at least use PicsArt to edit before sharing pics to Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, and the rest. But they may just find enough like-minded image makers on PicsArt's own robust social network to satisfy their needs. For the largest app community and some pretty nifty photo tools of their own, however, stick with our iPhone social photo app Editors' Choices, Flickr and Instagram.
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