Aviary is a potent free photo editor for iOS

I'm always on the lookout for another good photo editor so I can finish my images in the field and Aviary for iOS certainly qualifies.

This free editor (with the usual option for in-app purchases) has the power to enhance your photos and add useful effects and frames without going overboard.

Aviary has the usual things you would expect in a photo editor and it does the job without having to refer to help screens because it is intuitive to use. You can auto-enhance a photo with one tap, crop, rotate and straighten images, adjust saturation, sharpen and blur, and add text. There's a nice selection of useful frames that can be applied with one click.

Aviary provides editing tools to other apps and we've reviewed some that use embedded Aviary tools. Now it's nice to see Aviary provide a robust photo editor on its own.

The only thing I found missing was a really good undo function. You can click any effect or process to turn it off, but I wanted unlimited undos because it's pretty easy to perform a whole line of edits and find yourself wanting to backtrack.

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As mentioned, there are a lot of in-app purchases offered. it would set you back about $15 for all of them. I don't think any of them are needed, and you can do some first-rate editing without spending an extra dime.

There is a lot to like about Aviary, and I think I could use it as my basic editor for most photos. It's a universal app, and will run on any iOS hardware that has iOS 5.0. It's optimized for the iPhone 5.