On the iPhone it’s amazing. The brush selection and application of “paint” is very well implemented, and it’s really responsive. The best feature is its namesake, of course, the ability to use layers while painting. You can load images from your camera roll or photo library and manipulate them, paint on them, or just use them as a guide to paint freestyle on layers above them. This is a great feature.

There are a few drawbacks, though. First, is placement of the images from your camera. (If you’re not going to use this feature, you can ignore this issue entirely.) If you’re importing an image, more times than not it will not properly import. It distorts, rotates, zooms into some strange area of the image (randomly, it seems), or stretches the image beyond recognition. I found that if I cropped the image I want to use to a square aspect ratio using Photogene first, Layers seems to handle the image just fine.

Second is that the companion app for the Mac doesn’t really work well. It’s designed to allow you to “play back” the painting and render it out as an animation or as a larger still image — much like Brushes! companion Brushes Viewer application does on the Mac. The problem is that with several attempts, I was unable to get it to successfully render. The animation plays with strange artifacts — green pixels along edges of strokes. Attempting to export larger resolution still images — vital if this is to gain the kind of recognition in print that Brushes! has gained — just caused the program spit out an error message, saying that it couldn’t find the necessary .data file. The companion application was able to render a “full size” still without issue, but that’s too small to be useful.

I think these two issues are probably going to be fairly easy to solve (though I’m not a coder at all, so what do I know?). But even with them, the painting experience on the iPhone is fabulous. Once the export issues are resolved, this app is an absolute contender for the most useful and fun painting app on the phone.