Smartphone cameras have become extremely advanced these days, with some models producing near-DSLR levels of quality. To get the absolute best out of your smartphone, you should get some photography apps, which give you advanced editing options, help manage your photo albums, airbrush your selfies and let you doodle on photos, make GIFs and collages. Here are the very best of them.
VSCO CAM
VSCO CAM is an app that every smartphone should have. Its appeal lies in its simple and stylish interface, which offers a selection of stunning presets or filters and simple editing tools to allow you to play with color, contrast, white balance and exposure. VSCO also offers free cloud syncing and uploads to a personalized VSCO Grid account, which is a minimalist publishing platform a lot like Instagram, but for artists.
Available on: iOS and Android
Price: Free
You can’t make a list of photo apps without Instagram, even though it offers limited editing abilities. The gold standard in photo-sharing, this free app lets you edit and apply hip filters to your photos before sharing them on your favorite social networks. It is not overloaded with fancy features, everything is simple and intuitive and the social integration is seamless.
Available on: iOS and Android
Price: Free
Adobe Lightroom
Adobe’s latest Lightroom app is for all photography enthusiasts who need a solid feature set of editing capabilities. It comes with precise editing features like tweaking exposure, contrast, brightness, and vibrance and image presets for one one-touch adjustments. The Android version now offers the famous “dehaze tool” that will help with any fog and haze adjustments on a photo.
Available on: iOS and Android
Price: Free
Slow Shutter Cam
There are many manual camera apps in the App Store and some will work for long exposures, but Slow Shutter Cam is designed to perform one task, and one task only – that of long exposures. And that it does with aplomb. The app features three main shooting modes – Motion Blur, Low Light, and Light Trail – allowing you to mimic the effects of shooting at slow shutter speeds.
System: iOS
Price: $ 0.99
Facetune
This is an airbrushing tool that allows you to take any portrait and retouch complexion, eliminate wrinkles, remove dark circles and eyebags, zap zits and a lot more. It can also change the shape of your features and modify your facial expressions. Whether you want over-the-top editing or gentle retouches, this app is it.
Available on: iOS and Android
Price: $3.99 on iTunes and $5 on Play Store
Perfect 365
Since Kim Kardashian confessed to using this app, millions of people across the world have downloaded it in pursuit of a flawless selfie. This app allows you to airbrush your skin, brighten your eyes, reshape your features and try out makeup looks with one touch. The basic version is free, but you need to pay if you want more advanced features like retouching multiple people in one photo.
Available on: iOS, Windows and Android
Price: Free
Autodesk Pixlr
A very powerful photo editing app with over 2 million combinations of free effects, overlays, and filters. It’s a do-it-all app with the ability to edit photos, create collages, add frames, layer photos, apply effects and moods that run the gamut of subtle to kitschy, airbrush selfies and overlay captions and text.
Available on: iOS and Android
Price: Free
Over
Want to add beautiful typography to your photos? Over is a great graphic design app that lets you select a photo from your camera roll and edit it; add beautiful text, quotes, song lyrics or location; chose from a variety of beautiful fonts, adjust alignment and placement of the text and share it on various social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.
Available on: iOS
Price: $1.99
Slide
The talented team of Deepak Mantena and William Wilkinson that created Manual, one of our favorite apps featured here, recently launched Slide – a brand new way to create 3D photos with your iPhone. The juice is in its simplicity – compose your shot, then move your device in a smooth and swift horizontal motion to capture and tap the subject of your photo to watch it appear in 3D. You can share it as a looping GIF or video to Instagram, iMessage, Twitter, Facebook and more. Adding a little movement to your photos can make them really stand out, in a monotonous Instagram feed.
Available on: iOS
Price: $1.99
Manual
Manual is an iOS-only app that uses the new camera APIs in iOS 8 to let you open up the hood of your iPhone’s camera, giving you complete control over advanced settings like shutter speed, ISO, white balance, focus and exposure compensation. Manual also offers Live Monitor for your exposure values, a live histogram, a fill flash mode, an EXIF Viewer and a rule of thirds grid to help you take balanced shots. If you are a photography nerd, you will love this app.
Available on: iOS
Price: $1.99
Camera+
This is app that should very quickly replace your stock camera app, no matter what iPhone you use. It allows you to adjust exposure separately from focus; choose scenemodes like Beach, Sunset, Portrait, and Nighttime; use the iPhone’s flash as a continuous fill light to improve photo quality;use an image stabilizer and even a timer for self-portraits. The app comes with plenty of editing options, including crops, borders, filters and effects. Get it now.
Available on: iOS
Price: $2.99
Afterlight
Afterlight, in short, is Instagram on steroids. This gorgeously designed photo editing app offers 74 filters, 15 adjustment tools, 78 textures, 128 frames as well as cropping and transforming tools, which is pretty much all the average phone photographer needs. Best of all, you can still share its results to Instagram, as well as to Facebook, Flickr and more.
Available on: iOS, Windows and Android
Price: $0.99
Fuzel
This wonderful collage making app offers a wide selection of collage templates, ranging from simple grids to creative mosaics of different shapes, borders, labels, and decor. Fuzel’s animated slideshow tool also lets you chose from a range of layouts and background music from your music library, or the preloaded tracks, and it matches itself to the beats.
Available on: Android and iOS
Price: Free
Lifecake
Lifecake consolidates a parent’s photos of their kids from various sources into one easy to browse timeline. Based on your child’s birthday, it creates a timeline with a stream of photos and lets you experience the kid’s growth. You can zoom in to any age in seconds as well as compare stages from birth to today. Plus, you can also create glossy-paged, hardcover photobooks with photos from your timeline.
System: Android and iOS
Price: Free
Snapseed
The app was bought by Google a few years ago and has since turned into one of the most acclaimed and useful photo editing apps for Android. Snapseed has all the photo editing tools you will need, including basic editing, filters and effects, one-touch enhance tools, spot repair, lens blur and support for RAW photos.
And it’s entirely free.
Available on: iOS and Android
Price: Free
