Pixlr-o-matic may not have gotten a billion dollars from Facebook, but well before Instagram's big payday, it was acquired by a pretty big name in design software—Autodesk. And though Pixlr-o-matic lacks the rich social networking of Instagram (Free, 3 stars), it goes much further when it comes to pimping up your images with loads of effects. You can start with the free version, which is itself pretty capable, or upgrade to the 99 cent version, an investment that pays off richly in added effects. Pixlr-o-matic has another big advantage over Instagram: It's available for far more platforms—there's a Web app, Windows and Mac desktop apps, a Facebook app, as well as iOS and Android apps. 

Interface
The Pixlr-o-matic interface is dead simple and pleasing to the eye. You start out on its wood-panel home screen, from which you can snap a photo for use in the editor/enhancer, "upload" one from the device, use a sample image, or open the last one you worked on. I'd prefer the ability to see more than one recent image. The "upload" is a misnomer here and a remnant from the Web version: You're really just loading a photo from your Camera Roll here.

After you've snapped or selected your photo from storage, you'll see the picture framed on the wood-panel background, with just a few buttons: at top-left, the Crop button has but one option—square. Tapping it again takes you back to the photo's original aspect ratio. Along the bottom you'll see five buttons, Undo (which actually just takes you back to the home screen), a film canister (mood and vintage effects), a light bulb (lighting overlays), a picture frame (border effects), and a floppy disk. The last actually full-screens your photo and shows the sharing button. HTML MODULE 3884

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The final two buttons I'll talk about, at top-right, let you get load more effects of each kind, and a shuffle button that applies a random combination of film, lighting, and border effects; there are over 5 million possible combinations, so you could spend all day tapping this button to find just the right look. A real undo button would be nice here, since, if you get a combo you like and then tap shuffle again, you've lost the previous combo forever. Double-tapping on the preview image full-screens it

A couple of beefs about the interface: I could only view the site in portrait mode, rendering the app unusable with my iPad stand. And when I went to take a picture in Pixlr-o-matic with the iPad, the photo view was iPhone-size—kind of a waste of my big high-def new iPad screen. Same goes for the sharing menu, but there it's less important, and both of these size issues aren't as bad as using the always small Instagram on an iPad. A red-ribbon links you to Pixlr's site in the browser, which would include more editing capabilities if the iPad's browser had Adobe Flash capability.