With the rise, and seeming rise of Instagram, adding filters to photos has become more a standard than ever before in todays mobile photography world. With all the same filters available to everyone for the most part, it’s good to find a new app with some interesting new ideas and that’s where Bonfire Photo Editor comes in.
Bonfire Photo Editor is made by local developer Hugo Software and gives you a range of new photographic filters as well as editing capabilities and a magnify effect. There’s a number of filters supplied including realistic artistic painting filters, Funk filter, Glass filters, Color Tone filters, Dots filters and Selfie Enhancement filters.
The interface itself is fairly basic – and that’s a good thing. The controls are well laid out and easy to find, with the option to take a new photograph or apply the filters to one from your camera roll. You can flip photos, adjust levels like colour, brightness, saturation and more before adding a filter and it’s fairly easy to use.
Filters and the effects are all quite fast to be added, thanks to the OpenGL ES 3.0 engine that the app uses. Unfortunately the requirement for OpenGL means that some lower end phones won’t be able to install the app – but those that can will find a nice smooth interface.
There’s a large number of free filters available, but you’ll see a small ‘VIP’ tag on a couple within the app that qualify for In-App Purchases. The price on these additional filters range in price from $0.99 – $2.99 per item. I don’t mind IAP in cases such as this, there’s still a fair few free ones if you don’t want to purchase any, but I would prefer an all encompassing unlock of all features for a set price.
The filters are quite interesting, offering some refined, as well as more extreme effects which create some truly artistic and eye-pleasing results. Funk in particular offers some great results when added – though bear in mind these two are actually premium filters which will cost you extra:
There’s many options for filters, but there’s also an effect which you can add that give an extremely artistic take on a scene by highlighting the subject.
Those were my picks of the filters, but there’s more, here’s some samples:
You can grab Bonfire for free from Google Play now, it’s worth a look and you’ll find it’s a great way to make your photos pop by looking that little bit different. It’s a relatively small 6.7MB download for devices running Android 4.1 and above. There’s IAP, but it’s worth throwing a few dollars the developers way for such a good little app.
