App: Pixlr Express

With a name like Pixlr Express, Autodesk’s new flagship photo editor for Android sounds like it should be a relatively light app with only a few basic features. The menu offers a range of photo manipulation powers, with familiar tools such as Crop, Rotate, Blur, Colour Fix, Brightness and Contrast, Sharpen, De-Noise, Red Eye Reduction, and Whiten. Dive a little deeper, and you’ll see that each of these tools comes with its own settings, so one can micro-adjust any changes before they commit them. For instance, a user can control the radius of the Sharpen tool and the tolerance of the Red Eye tool. These sorts of fine tuners offer a huge advantage over many of the other tap-to-apply photo editors out there.

One adjustment that Instagram users will surely love is Focal Blur, which is essentially Instagram’s tilt-shift tool but with more control. Another neat feature is Colour Splash, which can turn an entire photo to black and white, except for a single colour of your choice. The bottom line is with over 600 effects on board, Pixlr Express is one of the most powerful Android apps in its category. Despite its minor flaws, it should be your go-to mobile photo editor.