Release your inner iPhone 6 artist with Paper Camera app

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Paper Camera is just plain fun. Plenty of photo apps let you apply filters after the fact, but this one performs its manipulative magic inside your camera, transforming your images in real-time before your dazzled eyes.

The filters are robust, offering a nice variety of cartoon- and painting-style choices to help make even the most uninteresting photographic situations colorful, graphic or both. And Paper Camera supports the same wacky filter set for videos you shoot.

We love the fact that the app saves both the original file and the filtered version to our library so we can do what we want with the original.

The free version of the Paper Camera iOS app puts a big old watermark on your photos, which seems only fair. But just like drugs offered to kids, the free version is designed to get you hooked on the good stuff and wanting more. (The Android version of Paper Camera goes for 99 cents; the BlackBerry app costs about $1.20.)

It doesn’t take Paper Camera long to call you a “Control Freak” and offer you the opportunity to unlock more features through a one-time buy of $1.99 or a subscription of .99 cents a month. The sales pitch from developer JFDP Labs is about as well done as the app interface, letting you know for just this small fee you can unlock the VIP treatment, get rid of the watermarks and download new filters as they are released.

With all the great choices in photo apps, it gets harder and harder to decide which ones are worth paying for, but we liked this little app enough to suggest you check it out for yourself.

Paper Camera just might connect you with your inner artist — and it looks especially awesome on the massive iPhone 6 Plus screen.

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