Description: Slider Camera is a replacement camera app for your Android smartphone that hopes to not only make it easier to take better advantage of the advanced optics in your smartphone, but also to quickly adjust and fine tune how images look as soon as you’ve taken them. You can control exposure, zoom and more just by sliding your finger on the display and there are advanced autofocus modes as well as the ability to change ISO sensitivity, too. Not only is Slider Camera an easy to use camera replacement app for high-end smartphones, but it’s also an accomplished photo editor with a wide range of quick, and more advanced, tools to help you make the most of your shots while on the move. Take a look at the introduction video below and read on to see what I thought of it.
How it Works: You’ll first need to get Slider Camera installed on to your device. It doesn’t matter what Android phone you have, but something like an LG G3, Sony Xperia Z2, Galaxy S5 or HTC One would make the most of these advanced features. There are two versions available, a free version you can download here or a Pro version that has extra features, which you can download here. Once you’ve downloaded Slider Camera, you can open up the app to see a short instruction piece on how to use the app.
Everything is pretty easy to use, and I’m happy to say it worked great with the camera button on my Xperia Z2. To test things out, I went to go find our family cat, Tigger, to play around with the controls.
As you can see, the slider to change exposure is easily accessible here and this is something I really appreciated. To change the exposure in Sony’s camera app is a real pain and takes far longer than I want it to. Tigger isn’t playing ball this morning, but we can see that the autofocus mode has changed. You can change to a single-tap focus, double-tap focus and shoot or to continuous AF and single-shot AF.
Once you’ve taken your image, you can use another great feature called quick edit to make small adjustments to your image before it’s saved to your gallery. These adjust brightness levels, exposure and such. Another nice touch.
You can take things further with Slider Camera though, as the app does include a whole range of photo-editing functions, too. These include all sorts of fairly basic functions like cropping an image, putting it in a frame and such to more advanced features like adjusting the overall warmth of the photo:
To being able to adjust the focus, which worked really quite well on my Xperia Z2.
Opinion: I’m a fairly keen photographer, one that does so somewhat privately I’ll admit, but I enjoy taking photos and I’m also someone who likes to do things properly. With Slider Camera I can adjust exposure to make sure I capture the light and shadows in a scene how I like them, and the fact that it’s so much quicker than the Xperia Z2 camera is a real breath of fresh air. I like being able to adjust levels and saturation as soon as I’ve taken a shot as well, meaning that I don’t have to spend hours going back through all my photos to make them look nice, I will have already done it at the time. The photo-editing side of things is really competent as well, with essential features like cropping and tone adjustments all being nice and easy to control. However, effects and such like stickers require a download before you can use any of them and I really didn’t appreciate that, but it’s not exactly difficulty.
Ratings
- Speed (4/5) – Slider Camera is nice and speedy, especially on a high-end device, with it running great on my Xperia Z2.
- Features (5/5) – This is packed full of features and as they’re all so easy to use, Slider Camera is one of the better camera replacements I’ve spent time with.
- Theme (4/5) – I’m not normally a fan of skeumorphism, but here everything looks nice and the fact that adjustments are done with sliding dials, rather than super-precise figures, you won’t get bogged down in the details.
- Overall (4/5) – A solid camera replacement, there’s more than meets the eye with Slider Camera and it’s one of the more impressive replacements, and photo-editing apps, that I’ve spent time with.
Pros
- Great option for high-end Android phones with overly-complicated software (we’re looking at you Samsung).
- Adjusting exposure on the fly is really handy as it has the most effect on your photos in a lot of cases.
- Photo-editing software has a lot of features and is just as easy to use.
- Quick edit once you’ve taken the shot is a nice feature for perfectionists out there.
Cons
- Requires you to download packs for a lot of things in the photo-editing side.
- Free version only supports 1-megapixel saves from the editor.
Conclusion: While the free version of Camera Slider has annoying ads and such, the Pro version is well worth the asking price. Not only is this one of the fastest camera apps I’ve used on Android, it’s also the easiest to use. These days our smartphones have seriously powerful cameras on them, and it’s about time that we start to take advantage of them more. With apps like Camera Slider we can start to do that. The Play Store listing is full of features and the app itself is easy to use, and allows budding photographers to take more intricate shots without having to jump through hoops. Making that ‘perfect shot’ more about the photographer and less about the software, Camera Slider is a great way to get more out of your smartphone photography.