Touch Baable is one of several programs that make it fun to play with photos in a Nokia device. It enables you to re-jigger photos’ colors and other attributes, add cartoon-like text bubbles and clip art, post them to Twitter and to friends, and even create simple drawings from scratch.

At $9.99, Touch Baable may be one of the pricier entries in this genre but it’s also one of the more flexible and feature-rich of its kind, too. For instance, its help screens are context-sensitive. It offers Undo and Redo controls and it automatically backs up your work for you. And it makes good use of the Nokia touch screen. It doesn’t offer the broadest range of visual effects, but so what – the truly useful ones are built into the Nokia camera.

Let’s look at some of the app’s photo-editing features. You can use Touch Baable to work on photos you’ve stored in your phone (perhaps downloaded from a computer) or, even with the app already open, you can snap a new photo on the go. Either way, photos get opened on a work area that the app refers to as a canvas. At first, a photo won’t fill this canvas, but you can scale up the image if required – to make its finer details easier to see, for instance. You can also flip this canvas both vertically and horizontally, and you can zoom in for a closer look.

As for editing the photo itself, your choice is limited to four “special effects” – posterize, brightness, contrast, and tint, all self-explanatory – and the adding of text bubbles and/or clip art. One pleasing touch: Once you’ve chosen an image effect from a text menu, the app offers a handy slider control to dial in the intensity of the effect. And once you’ve chosen a text bubble or bit of art to add, you can reposition and resize it by pulling with your fingertip on its handles. You also can adjust its opacity, again using a slider control.

At any time during an editing session, an Undo button is available to take you back a step to see how your canvas looked before the last action. And you can Undo more than once, stepping backwards as far as you like, all the way to a blank canvas. This ability makes Touch Baable particularly friendly, we’ve found. And it works because the app itself is saving your work automatically as you go along. And there’s more: In addition to Undo, there’s a Redo button (always available in the main pop-up menu), which in our book makes the app even more friendly.

Touch Baable also offers a set of simple drawing tools, which you can use on a blank canvas or on a photo. Tools are available to draw lines, rectangles, and ellipses. In each case, graphical handles enable you to reposition an object and change its shape. A slider is available to change lind widths and you can fill closed shapes with colors chosen from a built-in palette or from a chosen spot on a photo – a splendid way to assure matching colors.

Once you’re done with a photo or drawing, Touch Baable makes it easy to save your work in any of a variety of popular file formats. The program also offers a button to insert the image as your phone’s wallpaper. Sending photos to friends is easy, too. Out of the box, the program “knows” about SMS messaging, email, Bluetooth, and Twitter. (The app is easy enough to configure for Twitter, though naturally, you’ll first need to set up an account with that service.)

Our only wish: The app could be more generous in terms of how large it displays thumbnails of the photos stored in a phone. As it is, these images are pretty small and can be difficult to distinguish from each other.

All in all, Baadlands, LLC has done a great job with Touch Baable. We found the program to be very responsive and respectful of not only our intelligence but our ignorance, too: Its help screens are some of the best we’ve seen in terms of describing every option and function in lucid English.

The bottom line: If doctoring photos and blasting them off to friends is your thing, then Touch Baable will make a great addition to your Nokia phone.

Touch Baable is available for $9.99 (USD) in Ovi Store.

For more information about how to use this application, please visit the developer’s website.