It will come as no surprise that one of the slickest iPhone photo apps comes from the tech design leader: Apple. The company's iPhoto app for Mac OS X broke new ground in cool photo app interface features like skimmable gallery thumbnails and organizing your pictures in "Events." You get iPhoto for iPhoneSee it at Amazon UK and for iPad with a single $4.99 purchase at the iTunes App Store. Of course, you can do a lot more with a tablet's bigger screen size, not to mention the much larger size and input capabilities of a desktop computer, but Apple nevertheless manages to make a lot of what makes iPhoto great available on its smallest screen.

The iOS version of iPhoto even adds a cool sharing feature you don't get on the desktop iPhoto app, the Photo Journals online Web photo galleries. It also takes advantage of iCloud Photo Streams, an extremely convenient way to get your photos to appear on all your Apple devices—and even on your Windows PC with iCloud installed.

Since it's what Apple calls a "universal" app, iPhoto for iOS works on the iPhone 4 and later, the iPod touch 4th generation and laterSEE IT, and the iPad 2 and later.

Interface

Nobody does interfaces as beautifully as Apple. Occasionally, the beauty and slickness of the interface design can actually make it less clear, until you get the hang of it.

iPhoto's remarkable user interface features multitouch gestures for photo correction, brushes for applying effects onto specific areas of a photo. Some nifty organization tools include the ability to identify similar photos with a double-tap, as well as to flag, favorite, or remove images. As with any good photo editor, iPhoto offers a simple button that takes you right back to your original image view. 

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Interface
The home screen in iPhoto for iPhone looks different from that of the iPad version. Instead of the tablet's tabs, it shows five buttons across the bottom: Albums, Photos, Events, Journals, and Settings. The first shows your standard iPhone photo albums, including Camera Roll and Photo Stream. Tapping Photos displays a thumbnail grid all the photos on your device, and tapping on any of these opens a full view of the photo, with a filmstrip of the rest in the album sliding along the bottom of the screen—or along the left if you hold the phone in landscape view.

An "i" button shows info for the photo at hand, including any comments on Facebook or Flickr if you've previously shared it there. A Settings option lets you turn on Help overlay tooltips that explain exactly what each button does. One button at top right lets you quickly view the original image after any amount of edits.

You then tap the Edit button to start working on an individual image. This doesn't change the interface drastically, but just adds different buttons along the bottom, for Auto-Enhance, Rotate, Flag, Favorite, and Tag. But in front of all those is a suitcase button—representing your "toolkit" of photo-editing tools. These include Crop & Straighten, Exposure, Color, Brushes, and Effects. I would have preferred to see more than one Auto option, however, with different options separated out for brightness, color, and so on.

Basic Photo Adjustments
Adjusting your photo's exposure is handled in a way that's innovative for the touch interface: A bar along the bottom represents the image from its darkest to lightest tones, and you can either use controls on this bar or swipe up or down anywhere on the image to increase or decrease brightness, and right or left to do the same for contrast. It's sort of a histogram without the graph. The Apple-award-winning Snapseed for iPad uses a similar swiping approach, but both have the drawback of not letting you zoom while in this adjustment mode.

The artist's palette icon offers the four adjusters shown along the bottom—saturation, blue skies, greenery, warmth.  Just swipe up or down to increase or decrease saturation and left and right to change hue. The tool is intelligent enough to adjust greenery if you start swiping on the grass, or warmth if you swipe on a person's skin. If you place your finger on sky blue, the option changes to darken or brighten the intensity of the sky—a nice trick.

A settings gear icons offer a healthy selection of white balance options—sun, clouds, shade, flash, face balance—or you can choose a neutral point in the image for a custom white balance. The face balance option can find a face in your photo and balance the rest of the photo based on that.

Cropping and straightening is also cleverly implemented. You can pinch and zoom within a set crop frame, or resize the frame with or without preserving aspect ratio. But neatest of all is the ability to level by holding the iPhone at an angle after tapping on the compass-like control below the photo. This takes advantage of the device's accelerometer. You can also just twist two fingers on the photo (the way most people will probably do it).