Turn your Windows Phone photos into drawings with Sketch

Sketch is a Windows Phone app that converts your photographs into pencil drawings. Sketch can convert existing photos into drawings or launch the camera app and capture new photos to convert.

The Windows Phone photography app has twenty seven drawing styles to choose from, each having the ability to be fine tuned. Add sharing support for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr and Photobucket and Sketch isn't too shabby of a photo effects app for your Windows Phone.

Sketch's user interface is fairly straight forward. From the main menu you have the option to load an existing image to convert or launch the camera app.

Once you choose or take the photo you want to convert to a drawing, Sketch will take you to the editing screen. A thumbnail image sits at the top and you simply scroll through the different sketch styles. If you need to take a sneak peak at the original image, just swipe up or down at the thumbnail.

You can also add a dash of color or vignetting to the image and adjust the intensity, contours, brightness and contrast of the image. When you get everything just right, tap the save button and your save/sharing options are displayed.

If you capture an image to modify, an untouched copy of the image is saved to your Pictures Hub just in case you want to try another sketch style or just have an untouched copy. Also, if you use your camera app in Sketch, it will not preview your sketch style in the viewfinder.

Images are resized to about 2.6MB but does maintain your aspect ratio setting. Not really the best for printing but the images do just fine for electronic sharing (email, websites, etc.).

All in all, Sketch is a nice effects app for your Windows Phone photography library. I wouldn't mind seeing the end product saved at a larger resolution or at least the option to do so. Sketch has a healthy selection of styles and the ability to fine tune how each style is applied to your photo. It's a nice app worth trying.

Two versions of Sketch are available in the Windows Phone Store. You have Sketch Free which is a fully functional, ad-supported version. Then there's Sketch which is an ad-free version that runs $.99 and has a time limited trial version.