Ciel is a photography app for your Windows Phone 8 device similar to PhotoWeather Pro. It allows you to take a photo and place an overlay that will detail your current location, the current weather. Additionally there is an assortment of lifestyle tags that you can apply to your photos.
The layout is a little more straight forward and you can choose between a weather/location or location overlay. Ciel lacks the photo editing features of PhotoWeather Pro and there was a stability issue present that really held this app back. Luckily, a recent update included fixes to make Ciel more stable.
In the end while Ciel lacks photo editing, now that the stability issues have been resolved, it's a nice Windows Phone photography app.
Ciel's main pages have options to choose which weather/location, location (place) or lifestyle overlay you would like to use. Just tap the overlay pattern you like and you're given the option (control buttons at the bottom of the screen) to launch your Pictures Hub, save the overlay or share things via Facebook or Twitter as well as checking in with Foursquare. You can sign into these services through Ciel's settings menu which also includes the option to switch from Celsius and Fahrenheit.
If you choose to launch your Pictures Hub (the camera button) you can choose an existing photo or launch the camera app to capture a new photo to apply the overlay to. Whatever the choice, you'll have to crop the image square before the overlay can be applied.
Up to this point, Ciel works nicely. But prior to the update that takes Ciel to version 1.9, when you went to save the photo your get an error that prevents the photo from being saved. The developers recognized this problem and pushed out an update that corrected the issues causing the errors preventing the app from saving images. I'm still seeing an exception error when using the camera through Ciel but the images are captured, overlays applied and the end product can now be saved. The remaining error can be a little frustrating but it doesn't appear to effect the functionality of the app.
While the update makes Ciel usable, I have to scratch my head at the square crop (1000 x 1000). Why not take advantage of the full camera resolution? Or have the option to crop your images free-form?
It's nice to see the developer iron out the bugs with Ciel quickly. The end result is that you now have a simple photography app to let you overlay your weather, location or an assortment of lifestyle tags to your images. I can see it coming in handy if you want to send a "wish you were here" type photo to friends and family.
Ciel is a free app for your Windows Phone 8 device that you can find here in the Windows Phone Store.
