Photo manipulation is the oldest trick in the trade but still hasn’t lost it’s sheen. In fact it’s on it’s path to glory, with the advent of smart phones. Smart phones has slowly started to replace our digital cameras. Most of the smart phones now comes with a powerful camera capable of taking decent photos/ videos.

Cameras in windows phones have really come of age, thanks to Nokia and is heating up market. We’ve some pretty good apps to manage our own photo studio. Today we review 2 such apps, try to measure the performance of both and see how they fare in the real world.

It’s time for the contest…

We usually take one app and review it thoroughly. But our needs are different and what works for one doesn’t work for another. So in this new series we pick 2-3 apps from a category and take them head on. Do let us know what you think of this idea in the comments section.

The Contenders

We’ve handpicked 2 excellent photo editors available for the Windows phone ecosystem, Photo editor and Thumba photo editor. We’ll be comparing these 2 apps based on their UI, ease of use, features, performance, bugs and pricing. In each section we’ll be awarding individual scores for both the apps and the final score will be averaged out.

Let the match begin.

Enough said, it’s time to toss them to the ring.

Initial Impressions

Thumba photo editor has an awesome UI. When you open the app it lets you choose a photo from the album directly. Once you pick your photo, it gives you 4 simple buttons to choose from. The small camera lets you pick a different image, the magic wand pulls in all the effects/ options available, the save buttons saves you photo and the reload button resets the image to the last saved point.

Additionally you’ve a button to see how your image looks before and after editing. The transform screen has a lot of options, it’s integrated with the metro and sports a clean look. All the options are neatly spaced out and have a description for ease of use.

Minimal interface, at it's best.

Photo editor is well integrated with the metro UI. On load, you can pick an image either from your gallery or take a snap using your camera. It presents you different modes- effects, edit, doodle and paint. Each of these modes showcase a variety of features set.

Metro

Both the apps sport an interesting, uncluttered interface. They manage to hide their power under the hood and give the user exactly what he wants.

Thumba has a minimalistic interface and is really simple to use. Whereas Photo editor relies heavily on the Metro . From a user perspective, thumba manages to steal the thunder, though marginally, owing much to its simplistic interface.

Thumba : 9/10
Photo Editor : 8/10
Winner: Thumba

Features

Thumba photo editor is really powerful and offers more than 70 effects out of the box. You can simply re-size, crop or remove red eye with just a tap. It houses around 23 pretty powerful filters and some 15 effects. You can almost do anything that you do in any full fledged editor, like Photoshop. You can also play around the mirror effect to achieve some pretty cool results.

Filters are cool!

Mirroring is awesome

Photo editor also has some fantastic stuff under its hood. On load you can either choose a photo from the gallery or click a pic on the fly. As in Thumba, you can crop photos, rotate, adjust brightness, adjust contrast, re-size to reduce the image size, recolor the photo in RGB mode, paint to draw lines and shapes of different colors with various effects, doodle to add frames, text and brush your photos in different colors and much more. Doodling and paint can be used to create some surprising effects and is real fun to use.

Doodling is fun!

Thumba allows you to share your image in Flickr, Facebook and Twitter whereas Photo editor lets you post it in Facebook or mail to your friends. Another thing to note is that with Thumba you cannot directly access your camera, you can work only with your gallery images.

To shoot pictures and edit them on the fly you may have to download their free app Thumba Cam. Apart from these minute differences both the editors are head to head in terms of their features except photo editor brings in an element of surprise.

Thumba : 9/10
Photo Editor : 8/10
Winner: Thumba

Ease of Use

Though Photo editor sports a metro look, the developer has tried to stuff so much information in a single screen and after a point it tends to be confusing. In Thumba everything is logically arranged and so easy to find. We can achieve most of the effects with just a single tap and it’s evident that a lot of thought has gone into the design. The before/ after button also offers a nice touch and it makes it real simple to preview the images.

Thumba : 9/10
Photo Editor : 7/10
Winner: Thumba

Performance/ Bugs

There isn’t any noticeable performance issues with either of the apps. Both of them manage to run smoothly and were stable through out the testing process

Thumba : 10/10
Photo editor : 10/10
Winner: Tie

Pricing

Both of them are almost priced at a similar prize range. Thumba costs around $0.99 and photo editor will set you back by another 30 cents. Considering the features and stability they bring to the table I’d say it’s a steal.

Thumba : 10/10
Photo editor : 9/10
Winner: Thumba

Conclusion

Both Thumba and photo editor are some pretty powerful apps. Both bring in some great effects to the table. If you’re looking for an editor that lets you create some images for fun go for Photo editor or in case you’re looking for something more professional Thumba is the clear choice.

That brings us to the end of our first heads on article. Do let us know what you think about this and as always feel free to join us in the discussion. Thanks a bunch for reading.