Even the most experienced photographer armed with the best in hi-tech cameras finds it difficult to take the perfect picture with just a single push of the button. Professional photographers rely heavily on editing and filtering software and equipment to enhance the quality of their pictures. Therefore it makes sense that amateur cell phone photographers wanting a more beautiful picture should follow suit.
There is now a huge range of sophisticated photo editing apps available for your smartphone, which can help to make any photo picture perfect. Performing a general search for photo editing apps may not be enough; it’s worth searching for editing apps by feature to ensure you find the apps most suitable for you and your needs. These could include:
- Enhancing Features: Look for tools like cropping, colour fixing and blemish removal.
- Fun Features: These include weird and wonderful colour filters, borders, speech bubbles and 3D effects, which make ordinary pictures fun and original.
- User Friendly: In particular; simple navigation buttons and a streamlined design. Steer clear from apps that force you to search through lists and menus.
Here are our top 6 picks for your pics:
1. Magic Hour
Possibly the best filtering app out there, Magic Hour scores highly for fun and ease of use. The app comes with 40 standard and unique filters, making it favourably comparable to Instagram. In addition to the standard features, users have the opportunity to obtain an unlimited amount of new filters, or even create their own.
Downsides are the lack of image correction tools, like airbrushing or cropping.
2. PicSay Pro
If you want to have a bit of fun with your pictures, without the enhancing them then PicSay is the app for you. With this Andoid app you are able to add speech bubbles, past clip art onto photos and swap pieces of your picture for something completely different – for example you could put your friends head onto a gorillas body, or turn yourself into Darth Vader. Who wouldn’t want to try this?
3. Action Snap
Action Snap is one of the best apps for taking motion pictures in our opinion, as the app takes multiple photos at intervals of between 0.1 to 5 seconds, which can be combined into a single, stunning image.
4. Autostitch
Autostitch makes it easy for cellphone photographers to get sharp images of everything from tall buildings to wide panoramas. Autostitch works by stitching together a series of pictures, by finding similar elements. The result is one huge image with no visible seams or joins.
5. Darkroom
Featuring a very user-friendly interface, Darkroom is perhaps one of the best all round photo editing apps for the iPhone. It doesn’t have many features, but uses this to its advantage by offering just enough options to doctor your images quickly and effectively, turning even the lowest quality photos into a bright and sharp image.
6. Adobe Photoshop Express
Probably the best all round photo enhancing apps, that’s so rammed with fun features you’ll be adjusting and amending your images for hours. The app allows you to change the exposure, saturation or add filters and effects to make them stand out. You can also add borders and frames and use the integrated sharing feature to share your edited photos with your friends and family easily.
This article was written by Kathryn Thompson. Kathryn is a freelance writer and self confessed camera app-addict. When Kathryn shops for the new must have phones, she has to check what photo editing apps are available for it before anything else!