Would you like to add a painterly effect to your photos? ArtCamera, from MacPhun, enables you to imitate the styles of famous artists such as Warhol, Picasso and Monet. Or at least that’s the idea. The results are really not that similar to the real thing, but it’s still entertaining to see what kinds of results you can come up with.

ArtCamera has a variety of 20 filters — not all of them attempt to imitate the work of a famous artist. You also have effects such as radial blur, grayscale, blurred image and more. You might have to experiment quite a bit with different photo and filter combinations before something develops that you really like. It’s part of the fun but it also takes patience.

You can work with an image from your Camera Roll or one that you take using ArtCamera.

Choose from resolutions of 320 pixels wide to 1600 pixels wide. The higher the rez, the longer it takes to process the image. An image at 320 pixels takes as little as 10 seconds to render; an image at 1600 pixels takes several minutes. A resolution of 800 pixels is most balanced between time and quality, the dev says.

ArtCamera crashed on me three times while rendering an image at 800 pixels using the Oil Paint filter. That’s after restarting my iPhone, which is standard operating procedure. I also checked my available runtime memory with Free Memory app and I had plenty of room to spare. When that particular filter finally finished rendering, the image was unchanged from the original.

ArtCamera is on sale for $0.99 (50 percent off). MacPhun is sponsoring a contest for the best artwork using its app. Top prize is three redeem codes to each of five entrants. Contest ends February 15. Send your pics to MacPhun via email.

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category: Art, Entertainment, Worthwhile Apps