Pop Dot Comics HD Review

Pop Dot Comics HD is a heck of a lot of fun to mess around with. It's an app that makes it reasonably straight forward to turn photos into comic-book style illustrations before sharing them with friends. While I'd have loved to have created an entire comic strip through the app, what's available here is still quite enjoyable.

Load up an image and it's simple to get started. Choose from a selection of comic styles such as Sunday comics, Halftone, Pop comics and Noir, before getting on with the more subtle changes. Each comic style is reasonably distinctive and matches the tone that one would expect.

The finer nuances come from the wealth of other options. Plenty of sliders affect how things turn out, from the outline size of the dots to their border width. It sounds minor but the change in how the photo looks can be quite noticeable. It's also quite possible to spend a while adjusting things and turning quite perfectionist with things. This length of time extends through the fact that it takes a brief moment for the app to apply any changes. Once that is out of the way, it's onto choosing paper type which causes similar changes.

The easier but no less satisfying side of things comes from the "fun stuff" tab, offering up speech bubbles and comic-book style bangs and heart icons. It's fun to mess around with, although I did find it a little awkward to resize these icons with a pinch action not working quite how one would expect.

Sharing features via Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and email round off the options quite nicely.

At first, it'd be quite easy to be intimidated by Pop Dot Comics HD. With no tutorial and plenty of buttons to choose from, it's not quite as simple to gaze at as some photography filtering apps. This is unfair though as it is easy enough once you get to rips with it. Its effects are suitably encouraging and I can see both young and old losing plenty of time to getting things just right with their creations.