That's a lot to fit in - I should have used a 6'-screened Lumia 1520! The smartphone screen suddenly looks rather small once you start adding filters, with those added listed along the bottom, those available for adding in the left/right/up/down carousel system on the right, the filtered image in the main window and then an advert at the top (and no way to get rid of this through an in-app purchase, sadly).

The interface is based around the three toolbar buttons shown - one to switch between filtered and the original image, one to add another filter, and one to move on (to save or share).

The 'this is so empty' is a stock phrase, of course, but rather galling to see on a nicely composed photo regardless! Still, it shows a sense of fun from the developer. And, of course, half the fun here is in seeing what wild and wacky creative effects turn up in the process. Now, shunning limitations, right up front it's apparent that the aim here is not only to handle the full original image resolutions - in this case working at 8MP on the Lumia 830 and 5MP on the 930 - but also to allow the layering/blending of multiple filters. Starting with a new photo from a basic camera instance embedded in the app or from one that you've previously taken, it's straight into the filters. PhotoLab manages to avoid all these traps, though gets caught in another, plus there's at least one fundamental flaw in the workflow. There are, of course, a lot of utiltiies on every platform that claim to add filters to photos and then share or otherwise save the results - but there are often catches, usually to do with low output resolutions, poor algorithms or intrusive ads - or all three, in some cases.

Now if only the developer had programmed in a 'save' function before any final export. Let down by stability issues galore on anything less than a 2GB RAM flagship, PhotoLab is nevertheless an interesting application that goes beyond the usual image filtering to provide combinations and controls that will genuinely fire the imagination.

Photolab review