Best photo editing apps for your phone : Ever wondered how your friends on Instagram or Facebook post such gorgeous pictures with their phones? Are you insanely jealous of their orange and pink sunsets and bright blue oceans? Well, unless they’re professional photographers, they’re probably using photo-editing apps to boost their travel snaps.
Best photo editing apps for your phone
Here are 4 apps you can use to turn your photos from your phone into works of art:
1. Snapseed
Snapseed can dramatically improve the look and feel of your photos with just a few clicks. You can boost the colour of your sunsets, brighten an image or even take away shadows.
How to use: Open an image by clicking on the + icon on the top left and choose an image from your camera roll. Next, click the ‘Tune Image’ button on the bottom row of icons. Hold your finger on the screen to bring up options and move finger right and left to tweak. In the above photo, the brightness, saturation and shadow settings were increased to bring out the gorgeous beach colours. The checkmark on the bottom right will save your changes.
Bonus Tip: Hold your finger on the edited image for one second and you will see the original appear. This is great for viewing the photo to show before and after.
Available for FREE on iPhone and Android.
2. Camera+
Camera+ has one of the best selection of ready-made photo filters among the editing apps. There are over 40 free filters to use and many more if you’re up for paying a little extra. The above image was done with one click on the filter ‘red scale’.
How to use: Open an image by clicking on the + icon on the top right, selecting a photo and clicking ‘import’. Next hit ‘edit’ to see all your options. You can then select ‘filter’ and scroll through them to see a preview of your image. When you’ve picked the one you like, click ‘advanced’ on the bottom right to adjust the strength of the filter. Click ‘done’ on the top right when finished editing and remember to save the image to your camera roll.
Bonus Tip: This app is also great for taking photos since it includes exposure and focus options (yay, food pics!).
Available for $4.49 on iPhone.
3. Instagram
Instagram used to be just a photo sharing app but in its rise to fame it has added numerous features to let you actually edit your photos inside the app. This makes photo sharing much faster as you can skip the step of opening another app to edit (and have more time for glasses of wine at sunset!).
How to use: Open the image you would like to edit and select ‘next’. You can choose from over 30 ready-made filters at the bottom or choose to adjust yourself using the editing tool. There is a sun icon on the bottom middle if you want to make it easy and edit with one touch. For more detailed editing, click the screwdriver tool on bottom right of image and manually adjust your brightness, contrast, saturation, shadows, etc. Click ‘next’ on top right to save editing changes.
Bonus Tip: If you want to save the edits without posting to Instagram, just go into ‘airplane mode’ and post offline. The image will save to your camera roll without you having to share it on your feed.
Available for FREE on iPhone and Android.
4. VSCO Cam
VSCO Cam is a very popular editing app that has a sleek interface. It captures your edited photos in a photo stream and lets you share with your network as well. The interface takes some getting used to since it uses letters for the filter names instead of names like the other apps: B1, B5, C1, F2, etc. If you take the time to get used to the format of the editing tools, you will fall in love with this app.
How to use: From the library, click the + sign in the top middle and choose the photo to edit. Once you have uploaded and selected that photo, click on the tools icon on the bottom left-hand corner to go into editing mode. You can choose one of the 10 ready-made filters or click the wrench icon to adjust manually and change tons of features like exposure, contrast, fade, saturation and highlights. When finished, click checkmark in bottom right. When you’re back in your library, click the circle icon in the bottom right corner to save to camera roll.
Bonus Tip: When taking a photo in the app, touch two fingers on the screen at the same time. You can now move the exposure and focus to different spots on screen. Great for sunsets!
Available for FREE on iPhone and Android.
5. Instasize
If you’re looking for an editing app that can do more than just adjust image settings and filters, try Instasize. On top of its granular editing capability, the app also has creative features such as making collage layouts for up to six photos together and adding colors, gradients, or other photos to fill out the photo borders.
How to use: Click on the + button and choose a photo from your camera roll or from the free images library by Unsplash if you’re on iOS. Then you can choose to resize the image according to your preferred platform, add a filter, choose a layout, and add text and creative borders to truly make your photo stand out.
Bonus Tip: There’s a lot you can do with the free account, but upgrade to Premium to truly explore endless editing options. Get access to 100+ filters and patterns while being the first to use the latest updates on both iOS and Android.
