Curved - Text that Curves Review

New photo editors pop up almost as often as new games, and on iOS that’s saying something. Curved – Text that Curves focuses it’s attention on text art with a healthy selection of tools, and incorporates the features one sees in most popular photo editors. While the text art options here aren't as sophisticated as those which can be found in most desktop editing and publishing software, it more than gets the job done, and incorporates an ideal-for-touchscreen perk: custom curves.

As far as curviness goes, the app is quite buxom. There are a bunch of preset curves, all of which can be scaled and rotated easily. There are also a decent selection of fonts, colors, and outlines to select from. The best bit though, as mentioned, is that the app allows users to draw any curve they want on a blank pad and the app will recreate that shape. The only thing that would make this feature better is if it were able to overlay the outline on top of the photo or template image to align things more precisely.

Missing are depth and glow tools, the ability to use images and patterns as text fills, and color blending to name a few popular options, but for a free app it's better than most of what one pays for in the App Store. Manipulated text can be added to photos, or placed onto a selection of thematic templates. It’s a nice touch, but a nicer one would be to allow users to use the presets as backgrounds for their own photos.

Curving text is only the beginning of what this app can do. It has some basic image editing tools like cropping, brightness, saturation and hue control, and auto-enhance along with a free-hand drawing mode. The developers seem to be banking on the free virtual stickers and photo filters to tempt users into buying additional packs. Beyond those IAPs, the app is really free.

If some tools don’t seem fully thought out, a too often ignored facet of similar programs is present with the "open-in" feature. This allows users to continue to work in iPhoto, Sketchbook Pro and a selection of other text and image editing apps. There are also extensive social sharing options which users always love.

Curved – Text that Curves isn’t especially innovative beyond the custom curved text thing, but just having the ability to make decent text art easily on the go justifies the app's cost of nothing. And, for the creative type who likes working with text and images together, the app has lots of re-use value at an unbeatable price.