New app gives photos a kaleidoscope mirror effect

• Choose from eight different mirror options for photos
• App also comes with nine color filters
• Available for $0.99 on App Store

If you've ever wanted kaleidoscope-style mirror effects from your iPhone camera, you're in luck. Mirrorgram is available for iOS on the App Store for $0.99. An iPhone 4S was used for this review, but the app is also compatible with other iPhones, the iPod touch, and iPad.

What Mirrorgram gets right

Mirrorgram isn't the first photo app to mirror your images, but it does offer plenty of options for composing, as well as an intuitive interface. You can mirror your photos eight different ways vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, simply by clicking the "M" button or pressing your finger and moving around the screen. It's simple, which we like. You can mirror existing photos in your device's camera roll or photo stream, or take photos in the app with a live view of the reflection effect. Controlling your compositions with existing photos is pretty easy: Just swipe your finger in one direction to select which part to mirror, and pinch-zoom.

Nine color filters come included with Mirrorgram (with two other filters available for purchase at this time), and while they're not profound nor do they give you a lot of control, they can still add a little zest to your photos.

What Mirrorgram could do better

If you're composing your shots using the live view reflection, it can be a little disorienting and difficult to control. It's kind of like walking backwards by holding a mirror pointed behind you; it takes some getting used to.

Also, it only lets you apply one mirror at a time. You can get multiple levels of mirroring, but that will require saving the photo, then starting the mirror process over again. It'd be fun if you could do multiple mirrors at once.

In the top controls, you also see a water drop button, which toggles between tilt-shift focus and center focus. We haven't found that to be very useful yet, especially since it doesn't give you a lot of control over the blur intensity and width.

When you finally finish editing the photo, you may be disappointed to see that the sharing options are rather limited, only offering Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and StageBloc. Regulars of other sites will have to go through a few extra steps to share to their platform of choice.

Worth a download?

If you do a lot of shooting with your iPhone camera, keep this in your photography folder. This isn't the first photo mirror app out there, but it certainly gets the job done in a simple, intuitive way. It's just fun.

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