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Buying Guide: The 11 Best iPhone Photo-Editing Apps
Contents
- The 11 Best iPhone Photo-Editing Apps
- Apps 6-11
If the iPhone weren't a phone, it still would be a pretty awesome camera. Not only does the Apple shooter sport an excellent 8-megapixel 3264 x 2448-pixel backside-illuminated sensor, a five-element lens, and a respectable aperture of f/2.4, but the pocket device's built-in GPS can tag your photos' precise location, and its wireless connectivity means you can send your photos from anywhere anytime.
Software developers of iPhone apps have taken these capabilities and run with them. The best-known of this is no doubt Instagram, which combines artistic and retro filter effects with its own picture-specific social network. Instagram packages these two sides in a super appealing interface that makes added effects to photos a cinch and discovering other users' pictures addictive.
Although Instagram may be the most popular, it was hardly the first iPhone photo app with similar capabilities, and others have been following apace, hoping to unseat its hegemony. Our list will include both apps with strong editing features and those with strong social plays. But we're most interested in which apps give you the most possibilities for creating striking images.
Every one of the apps here can add interest to your pictures by applying filters. Of course the whole filter concept started with Adobe's flagship Photoshop £799 at Amazon UK desktop application. And special mention goes to Adobe Photoshop Touch, which not only has some filters, but brings some cool Photoshop capabilities to your handheld, such as the magic wand selection, layers, healing brush, and clone stamp. Although this app does things no others can, it's not our first choice among iPhone photo-editing apps, since it lacks basic tools like red-eye correction and leveling.
The main criterion for choosing a photo-editing app is whether you only want to quickly gussy up your image and share it right away—in which case an Instagram-style app is what you're looking for—or you're willing to spend the time to perfect it using a full-featured app. Whichever camp you fall into, our roundup below will help you make the decision.
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Adobe Photoshop Touch
$4.99
From the maker of the applications that started it all, Photoshop, comes this remarkable powerful photo retouching, adjusting, and enhancing app for the iPhone. It does things no other iPhone photo app can do, using tools not found elsewhere, including the beloved Magic Wand, Healing Brush, and Clone Stamp tools. A nice assortment of effect filters round out the toolset. All this in a surprisingly useable and touch-friendly interface, though the iPhone's small screen size isn't ideal for this kind of advanced editing. Like Photoshop, it lets you create images in layers, but it lacks some basics like red-eye removal and leveling.
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Apple iPhoto
$4.99
A full-featured (at least in iPhone terms) photo editing-app, iPhoto for iPhone sports among the most gorgeous interfaces of any app you'll ever encounter. Brushes pop up for local corrections to brightness, color, sharpness, red-eye, and more. Swatches roll up to offer you filter looks for your photos. There's even a protractor that levels the image as you tilt the phone! The app finishes by offering all the sharing options you could want, and adds its own Journal option—web-based galleries you can share.
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Aviary
Free (with in app purchases up to $2.99)
This is the company whose API is behind dozens of other photo apps, and you can see why. The program (for some reason such a full-featured app seems deserving of that moniker) includes all the photo editing tools you could want--brightness, contrast, colors cropping, and those ubiquitous filters. The easy-to-use, customizable interface takes you through the steps needed to correct, enhance, and share your photos out to social networks and email. A funny extra called "stickers" lets you apply moustaches, eyeglasses and other gags, but the capable Text tool adds serious—or not-so-serious—captions and titles. Once you're done, you can upload your work directly to Walgreens for pro printing.
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BeFunky
Free
BeFunky tries to be a lot of things—a combination Instagram-style mobile social photo app, Flickr-style web photo organizer, Photoshop Touch-style full-photo editor, and a sort of YouTube for photos. It does offer a lot for free, including basic photo editing tools than Instagram, including white balance, leveling, fill light, and sharpening. It also includes the Instagram/Photoshop-style effect filters. But with so many goals, the app is unwieldy, a sort of jack of all trades and master of none.
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EyeEm
Free
EyeEm is pretty similar to Instagram, but is distinguished by letting you see the effect filters apply even before and during taking a picture. But it doesn't offer much in the way of standard photo editing. Its comes with its own photo social network that emphasizes keyword tags. The app features good community features and lets you shares easily to major photo social networks. Another plus is that it's Available for all three major phone OSes, including Windows Phone.
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