One of the things that delighted me most about the Nokia Asha 311 was its extensive range of photo editing and effects options. I mentioned it briefly in my review of the device a few weeks ago but I think this now deserves to be considered in more detail.
We expect our mobile phones to have some basic photo editing features, such as cropping, rotating or adjusting the brightness and contrast.
There are also dozens of editing and photo effects apps that you can download in the Nokia Store. However, what really surprised me was the depth and range of photo editing options already available on the Asha 311.
You can spend plenty of time making your images look more fun, retro, sharper, colourful or downright strange using the native photo editor on the Asha 311 before you ever need to download a photo app.
The editing options
Let’s go through some of the options and help you get started on transforming your day-to-day images into something extraordinary and artful.
First you need to open the Gallery to look through your pictures. Tap on a specific image to bring it to full screen and then tap once anywhere on the display to bring up some options, such as delete, send or go back to the gallery view.
To edit the photo, press the ‘more’ icon with the 3 horizontal stripes in the corner – this brings up a menu where you can select ‘edit photo’.
Here is the full list of photo editing options that will appear on the screen.
- Rotate and flip
- Crop
- Effects
- Warp
- Frames
- Clip Art
- Text
- Brightness and contrast
- Auto enhance
- Colour
Obviously, for any given photo you will probably not go through every single effect or editing function! However, there are a couple of things worth keeping in mind.
- You can see the changes on screen but the effect is not saved until you have pressed the tick icon.
- Even when you have pressed the icon to save, your phone creates a new image with your changes, so the original photo is left in tact.
Hopefully, this will give you the reassurance and freedom to let your imagination and creativity run riot!
Rotate and flip
You can rotate the image clockwise and anti-clockwise 90 degrees at a time. You can also flip the image either horizontally or vertically.
You just press any of these four options along the bottom of the screen and you’ll see the image changing in real-time. If you like it, don’t forget to press save, or alternatively hit back to return to main editing menu.
Crop
Pinch and zoom in (or out) using two fingers on the highlighted area of the photo that you wish to crop.
Using one finger, you can also move the highlighted area to crop around a different part of the photo.
Effects
Selecting Effects lets you scroll through a horizontal menu of many different effects and filters that can be applied to your photo.
Nothing is permanent until it has been saved so you might as well have fun seeing how your photo looks in oil paint, negative, solarise, blur and so on.
Warp
Remember those trick mirrors that they have at the circus? This is a 21st century version of that.
Again, there are several variations – Squish, Swirl, Bulge, Stretch and Squeeze. What’s really clever is that there is a slider where you can control how much of each specific warp is applied.
Frames
Choose a frame to go around your photo. To go through each frame in quick succession, you only need to swipe across the screen.
My favourites were the newspaper and the VIP access frames.
Clip Art
This is where things start to really surreal. Ranging from crowns, comedy glasses to a magician’s hat you can adorn your friends with all manner of comedy objects. In other words, you can make them look really silly.
After choosing an object, you can also adjust the size and move it around the photo for a perfect fit.
Text
Add text to the photo by simply typing in the message box. You can add whatever you want, although I guess most common will be names, locations or personal messages such as happy birthday.
Again, once you have written the text you can move it around the photo and adjust the size.
Brightness and contrast
Here, two straightforward sliders to let you adjust the brightness and contrast of the photo. This helps you to get the exact look that you want and is especially helpful for giving dark photos a colour boost.
Auto enhance
For much simpler corrections of brightness and contrast you may want to give the auto enhance feature a try.
This has further options for auto-colour, auto-levels, auto brightness and contrast and filling in the light.
Colour
Again, if you’d rather take control rather than using the auto-enhance options then you can also adjust the colour manually.
There is a slider each that lets you adjust the Red, Blue and Green.
All these editing options are really simple to use and lots of fun. You can see the changes to your photo as soon as you’ve tapped on the screen. Don’t like what you’ve done? Try again!
Let us know how you have been getting on with the photo editing features on your Asha Touch device.