Photo app of the week: Perfectly Clear for Android

— -- Perfectly Clear is a photo correction app for Android devices from Athentech Imaging, ported over from iPad and iPhone. It's a slick app with a decent interface and the ability to automatically correct your images in key ways, letting you easily enhance several images on the fly.

We were given early access to version 1.0 of the app, which debuted for $0.99 on the Google Play store on Wednesday. The app will retail for $1.99 on the Google Play store after the month of August.

There are no shortage of photo correction apps for smartphones of all flavors, and Perfectly Clear fits the mold well. It has large icons, the ability to adjust things like exposure, sharpness, and tint, and offers an easy way to share photos to popular sites like Facebook.

We found that Perfectly Clear does a few things well that separate it from the pack, but it does have a few key misses that keep it from being among the best photo apps we've reviewed. It's one of the few apps that really walks you through most of the correction process quickly, making some basic corrections as soon as you open up a photo.

Correcting a photo is nice and easy. The title screen gives you the option to select a photo from your albums or take a photo using an external camera application. If you choose your albums a slick animation brings you over to the selection screen, where you can pick an album and drag and drop a photo into a little bin at the bottom for editing.

The drag and drop functionality wasn't as tight as we'd have liked, but once you've finished selecting one or more images you're brought straight into the editing process. After a few seconds of loading, the camera automatically applies its corrections, allowing you to view the difference, select from other filters, or apply optional filters.

A gray bar is placed vertically down one section of your image, which you can slide to the left or right, overlaying the original image over the "better" corrected one. This lets you easily see just how drastic the changes were. We found in most of our photos that the biggest change was done to brightness, with the app providing some much-needed leveling of the photos we threw at it.

If the automatic correction wasn't quite enough, you can go into a sub-menu by pressing the dual arrows on the screen. This lets you apply filters to adjust exposure, depth, vibrancy, tint, or skin tone. You can also purchase some extra "beautify" filters for $0.99, with the option to preview the effect for free before purchasing.

From a functionality standpoint, we liked most of what Perfectly Clear did, with a level of polish that escapes most of the free Android alternatives already on the market. Its animations are slick, the app works in both portrait and landscape modes, and it includes a helpful "?" button on many screens that makes app navigation a little easier. Press the question mark and the app places little green dots over the on-screen buttons, with text explaining what each one does.

The app does have two glaring omissions : the lack of an in-app camera function and the inability to zoom in on your photos during the editing process. The lack of a camera function creates a jarring disconnect as you are brought to an entirely different app to take a photo. It's a common—though not universal—problem on Android photography apps, and something we're still rather puzzled about.

The lack of a zoom feature is a really tough sell, though, as it makes inspecting the corrections all but impossible. There are plenty of apps that offer photo correction, and the inability to accurately judge corrections within the app felt off.

We still think that Perfectly Clear is a tight little app with a slick interface that does its job quite well, but the functionality issues make us reticent to recommend laying down money for the app until they are fixed.

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Find more photo app reviews from Reviewed.com at DigitalCameraInfo.com. Reviewed.com is a division of USA TODAY.