While Windows Phone cameras are improving, so are the photography apps that let you edit the pictures you take, such as Thumba Photo Editor. Thumba is a basic photo editing application for your Windows Phone that offers a respectable amount of processing tools.
Thumba Photo Editor is a very stable application with no bugs, glitches or crashes experienced while testing the application out. The tools available are very similar to a desktop editor only lacking a print button for your images. Thumba gives you the ability to turn a so-so picture into a nice picture.
To read more on Thumba Photo Editor, ease on past the break.
The $0.99 app has dozens of adjustments and special effects spread across a three page hub. It is one of the more extensive collection of processing tools I've seen. Broken down the hubs and features are as follows.
Image: This mainly deals with the size and orientation of your photo. Here you can crop, resize, rotate, flip and add a color border to your photograph. You also will find a red-eye removal tool and "pinch and bloat" tool that allows you to distort portions of your photo.
Adjustments: Here you will find controls to adjust your images contrast, brightness, white balance, hues, saturation and other area of the photos appearance. The Adjustments page also has a Black/White conversion tool as well as a noise reduction filter (reduces the digital grain low light or high ISO images can produce).
Effects: This is where creativity meets photography. The Effects page has conversion tools for 3D and HDR (high dynamic range) as well as means to convert your image into a sketch, add a glow effect, apply a solarize filter, and many more special effects. These tools deal primarily with the final output you want your image to reflect. There is a sharpening tool on this page, which I expected to see on the Adjustments page.
Thumba allows you to apply all the editing tools to photos already saved to your Windows Phone or you can launch the application directly from your camera app once you take the picture. It will be listed under "Extras" on your image review menu.
While you are applying any of the effects or adjustments you can reset the image, backing out of whatever manipulation you've applied. This is a handy way to fix a mistake without having to back completely out of the editor. Once applied, you can view the image in a Before/After Hub that shows you how much your image has changed. From here you can save the edited image or reload it and start from scratch. When you save an image file, the image file is saved under a unique name with your original file remaining in tact.
From here you can share, upload to Skydrive or set the image as your wallpaper. As extensive as Thumba is, I'm a little surprised that you can't at least email edited photos directly from the app.
As far as quality goes, I liked the results that Thumba produced. From the HDR filter to the Sketch filter (turns your image into a pencil drawing) the options allow for a lot of processing creativity. The one filter that stood out for me is the Vintage Filter that gives your image an old film appearance. It's not an antique style but more along the lines of what your old family snapshots from the 60's and early 70'slooked like.
The only downside that jumped out at me in using Thumba is that there is no way to apply the adjustments to a selected area of a picture. If I have a bright area of a photo that I want to darken, it would be nice to be able to select the overexposed area to adjust.
One other minor nit is that you are editing off what is basically a large thumbnail. While the smaller screen of a Windows Phone has limited real estate, it would be nice to have the ability to zoom in to view the finer details of an image. Regardless, I was able to edit images that were marginal with Thumba turning them into presentable photographs.
For me, Thumba won't replace my desktop editor but if I need to edit a photo while on the fly, it'll do just fine. Thumba Photo Editor is running $0.99 over at the Marketplace and there is a trial version available to let you get the feel for the application before you buy. If you'r looking for an editing application that will do a little more than most, Thumba is worth a hard look.
You can find Thumba Photo Editor here (opens your Zune desktop).
