Photo editing has really come far in a short amount of time. Photo apps for Android, iPhone and iPad have allowed a new generation of photographers to explore the limits of their creativity.
But there are photo apps for more than just photo editing. Photo apps run the gamut these days, from tide and sunset calculators, lens databases to photo apps that can allow you to trigger your camera via your smartphone or tablet.
There are so many photo apps out there it can be difficult to know what’s worth your time. In this post we’ve rounded up some of the best photo apps designed with photographers in mind.
These are photo apps that are more than just a quick novelty act; rather, the apps in this collection all offer something extra to your photography, whether it’s that remote triggering capability, a depth of field calculator or daily inspiration.
We’ve tested all of the photo apps in this post, and we’ll continue to update with more as and when we find ones we like.
Best Photo Apps: ioShutterCam
Create beautiful timelapse films or just mess about tracking any slow- moving subject with ioShutterCam. This app works with your iPhone’s built-in camera and is easy to program, automatically compiling the separate images into a video.
Other nice touches include ShakeToTake and ClapToSnap, where the app takes a shot upon a shake of your iPhone or a clap of the hands. It’s really fun to use.
Best Photo Apps: Pop Camera
Hipstamatic users will likely feel an overwhelming sense of familiarity on downloading Pop Camera. But with a funky design and the ability to shoot double exposures and sequences, it has its own uses.
Toy camera effects can be achieved using a variety of vintage and retro filters, and there aren’t any In-App purchases. The ability to shoot in high resolution means you can share your pictures via Twitter, Flickr and Facebook.
It’s a great app, but if you’ve already got Hipstamatic or Instagram, you may find that the £1.49 isn’t wholly worth it.
Best Photo Apps: Photosynth
The Photosynth application enables you to pan an iPhone or iPad up, down and around, taking images automatically. You can then merge the shots into one impressive 360° horizontal and vertical global panorama. At least that’s the theory.
In reality, the photo app actually works best when you use it in wide- open spaces with plenty of varied surrounding scenery.
Smaller or more uniform environments tend to confuse the software somewhat, which unfortunately results in a misaligned and unusable final image.
Best Photo Apps: Pro HDR
Pro HDR is a great little app that creates true High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos by taking two separate shots of the same scene – one for the highlights and another for shadows – and quickly blending them together into a single HDR shot. You can create stunning full-resolution HDR images with just a single tap.
Colour and contrast are easily fine-tuned, but the app usually does a great job by itself, with seamlessly merged highlight and shadow areas – even if the latter often suffers from some high- ISO image noise.
Best Photo Apps: Hueless
As with apps like Instagram, Hueless gives your photographs a retro feel by taking them in black and white. The app achieves this live, as you compose, meaning there’s no post-processing required.
Customisation options include exposure and contrast adjustment, colour filters and a choice of aspect ratios.
Nippy shot-to-shot performance makes Hueless a pleasure to use, while its results give a decent simulation of monochrome Lomo-style film images.
Best Photo Apps: PhotoCalc
Calculating correct exposure times,
hyperfocal distances or depth of field can be a tricky business, but these are all equations that PhotoCalc can perform in an instant.
This photo app can also use your location properties to determine local sunrise and sunset times and even includes an extensive glossary of photographic terminology.
The only obvious omission is an option for calculating long night-time or ND-filtered exposures.
Best Photo Apps: Canon Lenses
The Canon Lenses photo app is a database of nearly every current and recently discontinued Canon lens, which can be grouped by type or quality. You can then sort each category by price, focal length or aperture.
Select a lens and you’re greeted with detailed information on filter thread diameter and weight. Many lenses are also accompanied by links to professional online reviews.
Best Photo Apps: Blipfoto
Blipfoto is a community for sharing photos of personal significance. The aim is to upload a meaningful photo each day to create a photographic timeline of your life.
Now, thanks to the Blipfoto app you can also view other members’ images on the go.
The general quality of photography is impressive, yet it can often be the background stories that are the most moving.
Best Photo Apps: Scoopshot
Having a smartphone by your side makes it easier than ever to capture a newsworthy shot.
With the aid of Scoopshot you can upload an image or video of breaking news, set your price and offer it for sale – Scoopshot only publishes shots for 48 hours to keep content fresh.
Journalists and media companies can view your profile and may send you tasks if you fit their requirements.
Best Photo Apps: Foap
Have you ever fancied making some money from your photography? Submit your finest shots to the attractive Foap website where each is given a flat rate $10 (around £6.50) download fee.
However, Foap takes a 50 per cent cut of this, and to maintain overall content quality you’re forced to rate five photos from other members for each shot that you submit.
Uploading is also restricted to the Foap iPhone app, making it tricky to upload DSLR images.
Price: Free; earn $5 per image
Download this photo app:
www.foap.comScore: 2/5
Best Photo Apps: Percolator
Coffee-themed Percolator turns your photos into mosaics of circular bubbles for a beautifully unique stylised pattern effect.
Variable transparency and bubble size makes the effect as extreme as you like. Anything from a subtle bubbly overlay to full-on impressionist hallucination is possible.
Enough other customisation options are available to tweak your look without things getting baffling, and it’s all wrapped up in a slick and simple interface.
Best Photo Apps: Pashadelic
We’ve all seen a great shot and wondered where it was taken. With Pashadelic, you can find exactly where to snap the best scenes that a city has to offer.
Browse through galleries of local images or switch to a map view with specific directions. Stick to major cities and you’ll find plenty of inspiring shots worth hunting out, but go off the beaten track and the app isn’t that much help.
Best Photo Apps: Awesomize
This free photo app offers many of the features of Snapseed, along with the retro effects of Instagram, plus useful extras such as horizon straightening. There’s single-click enhancement too.
All good, but the stoner Californian labels on the interface – Awesomize, More Cowbell, Joan of Art – are hard to remember and a bit annoying. A shame, as otherwise this is one of the better free photo editing apps.
Best Photo Apps: Shoot&Learn
The iOS app Shoot & Learn shows you exactly where to position compositional elements with the aid of overlay templates like the rule of thirds, golden section and diagonals.
It can be a doddle to compose shots with a pleasing layout, but if you also fancy learning why these theories work, each template is accompanied by a fascinating written explanation plus photographic examples.
Best Photo Apps: Alt Photo
The iOS app Alt Photo comes from the respected Photoshop plug-in gurus at Alien Skin. It joins the roster of existing apps that’ll give your iPhone photos a film feel, but it’s a step up from your average ‘analogue snap’ photo app.
Choose from over 50 film styles, Lomo looks and retro borders, then tune effect intensity, crop to any size and save at full resolution. It’s nippy too, but won’t cost you a penny.
Best Photo Apps: TriggerTrap
There’s not really a great deal that a smart phone can’t do these days, and thanks to Triggertrap, it can now also be used as a remote shutter release for your DSLR.
Remote shutter releases are handy for setting off your camera without you having to touch it (introducing shake), or for setting your camera up near something that doesn’t appreciate human activity, such as wildlife, or the finish line at a sporting event.
Several kits are available to connect most current Canon and Nikon DSLRs to your phone while the Triggertrap app takes control.
In addition to standard single-shot and long-exposure release modes, the app also includes a highly customisable time-lapse intervalometer and an impressive DistanceLapse function.
This works in conjunction with your phone’s built-in GPS to snap only when a set distance has been covered. There’s even scope for taking long exposures in
HDR (high dynamic range)mode.
In the field Triggertrap performs reasonably well, but a laggy interface puts something of a dampener on the user experience. We’d also like an option to turn off the phone’s screen during long time-lapse sequences to help conserve battery power.
Triggertrap isn’t the only device of its kind – ioShutter is a very similar product, but sports a slicker interface and is generally more pleasant to use. Triggertrap is significantly cheaper, but unfortunately the cost-cutting shows.
SCORE: 3/5
Best Photo Apps: Photography Week
After establishing itself as one of the most successful photography magazines on the iPad, Photography Week is now available on the iPhone, and has been redesigned to make the most of the platform.
It features video guides to technique and the latest gear, practical advice for improving your shots and more, and you get your first five issues free!
Score: 4/5
Best Photo Apps: Adobe Photoshop Touch review
There are plenty of decent image-editing tools for smartphones and tablets that enable you to carry out basic adjustments and enhancements or apply special effects.
However, Photoshop Touch is altogether more ambitious. In Adobe’s own words, it provides the core features of Photoshop in an app designed for tablets. It’s already available in an Android version, but now you can get a version for the iPad, too.
At £6.99, it’s a fraction of the price of the ‘real’ Photoshop. But then it also has to make do with a fraction of the computing power of a desktop computer, a fraction of the storage space and a much smaller screen. Can it really match the desktop version in features and performance?
Hardly, but it does come a lot closer than you might expect. You can create multi-layered images using familiar selection tools and processes, apply Levels, Curves and other standard Photoshop adjustments, and apply a range of special effects.
There is one profound limitation though. Photoshop Touch has a resolution limit of 1,600×1,600 pixels, which means that your images will be fine for on-screen or web use, but not much more.
Photoshop Touch tools
Layers are easy to create and manage, and you can combine them using Photoshop-style Blend Modes and Opacity. You don’t get Layer Masks as such, but you can blend layers with ‘Fades’, which are like customisable gradient masks. The Scribble Selection tool works pretty well, too.
You select the areas to keep, the areas to remove, and finally you use the Refine Edge tool to paint around the outline, and then the software separates the background from the foreground.
With the ‘camera fill’ feature, you can use the iPad’s built-in camera to take a photograph and use it as a layer within your current project.
Levels, Curves, Saturation, Shadows/Highlights and other adjustments can be applied from one menu, while effects such as Gaussian Blur, Sharpening, Sepia and Posterise are applied via another. Some can also be applied locally using a Brush tool.
The interface looks strange and unfamiliar at first, but once you start to see how the Photoshop tools, menus and palettes have been translated into touchscreen alternatives, it all becomes much simpler.
There are some excellent hands-on tutorials to guide you through the basics, and once you’ve tried a few you’ll have no trouble striking out on your own. And that’s when you start to notice that the touchscreen control has advantages.
It feels more natural for painting, for example, and following object outlines, because it doesn’t have the ‘jittery’ action of a mouse. It works well with sliders, too, and Photoshop Touch gets round the lack of a keyboard by displaying a pop-up numeric keypad for entering values.
But there are drawbacks. Smaller brush cursors are hard to see, simply because the tip of your finger covers them up as you drag. And some of the more processor-intensive art effects are too slow for real-time adjustments with the sliders.
The overall experience is very positive, though. Photoshop Touch doesn’t cost much, yet it replicates regular Photoshop tools and adjustments remarkably effectively.
Even the sharing options are good. You can edit photos from your Facebook albums, and share your images via Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which also offers a roundabout route for getting layered Photoshop Touch files into Photoshop. There’s also a neat Google Image Search tool for finding photos released under the Creative Commons licence, which should make them free to use.
Our Verdict
But there’s no escaping that 1,600×1,600 resolution limit. Just what are you going to do with the images you create? They’re fine for sharing online, but what else?
The resolution’s too low for printing anything larger than a postcard. If you live your life on your tablet and interact with the world via Facebook, Photoshop Touch is rather good. But serious artists will want to work with full-resolution images, and Photoshop Touch doesn’t do that.
This is a really good app, and Adobe has done a great job of adapting Photoshop for the touchscreen interface. But until the resolution limit is addressed, it’s hard to see where you can go with it.
In Short
Adobe has effectively transformed its big, lumbering Photoshop into a super-slick iPad app, but the resolution limit is a major handicap.
We like…
Its power and simplicity, and how natural the touchscreen control feels
