Top Ten: Photo Apps

15 Jul Top Ten: Photo Apps

1. Instagram: I have to start with this one. This is a popular social media site and app used for sharing photos. I love seeing posts from Etsy, my favourite Etsy shops, calligraphers, designers and my favourite stores. I love sharing my word art posts. You can find my profile here. Instagram has several built in filters you can use to ‘enhance’ your photos before you share them. I find Instagram’s only-square cropping and filters to be too limiting for my preference, so I generally use an additional photo editing app beforehand. Keep reading to find out more!
2. Squareready: This is the app I use in order to have ‘non-square’ images on Instagram. It’s a bit of a funny interface, but once I got used to it I started using it on a regular basis. Some photo editing apps can upload directly to Instagram, but I still use it on a weekly basis for my word art posts.
3. VSCOcam: This photo app features an array of advanced photo editing tools as well an online photo sharing community. I find it a tad complicated to navigate, especially when it comes to understanding the meanings of all the small, wordless icons. To edit a photo, choose one of 10 filters. If you wish, you can make several additional adjustments to 15 features such as exposure, temperature, contrast, rotate, crop, fade, tint, shadows, highlights. Since I am a VSCOcam newbie, I still have yet to explore everything it has to offer.
4. CameraBag: The icons in this app are much easier to understand compared to VSCOcam. Import or take a photo in the app and choose from 26 crops/borders and 28 filters. If you want to adjust it, simply use the sliders to get your desired look. This app makes it easy to save your edited photos or share them directly to your preferred social media outlet. A bonus for me is that I don’t have to use Squareready when uploading directly to Instagram from CameraBag.
5. (Photo Editor by) Aviary: This app features a beautiful way to edit existing photos on your iPhone. Choose your photo, then select an enhancement, and one of 12 effects. You can adjust the orientation, focus, crop, brightness, contrast, warmth, saturation, sharpness. If you’re picky, this app also allows you to whiten teeth and correct blemishes. If you’re really adventurous, you can even add stickers, frames, draw and type on your images.
6. Typic+: This app is fun because it allows you to not only edit your photo, but you can also add text and graphics to your image. Being a ‘Word Art’ fanatic, I love this app for making word art on the go. This particular app makes it very easy to type, choose a font, add a drop shadow, adjust the opacity, colour and kerning. Then you can choose from 144 graphics to add, all which can be adjusted as well.
7. Over: This app is essentially the same idea as Typic+, but I personally find the wheel navigation more complicated to use. You can add text and graphics and adjust the size, opacity, crop, tint, location, line and character. Below I have two simple word art pictures I made with each app.
8. Path on: This super cool app allows you to swipe or draw on an image and then create text which follow that pattern. You can use several adjustments such as font size, spacing, alignment and more, to ensure the text appears as it should along that line. Very fun!
9. Bokeh Lens: I’ve had fun playing with this app to create a more blurred background on some of my iPhone photos. Simply use your finger to paint the area you want blurred and then adjust the feathering and blur level. It really is that easy.
10. Appsgonefree: Although not technically a ‘photo app,’ I had to add this one in because it regularly features a paid photo editing app for free. This app is where I got CameraBag, Over, Typic+, Path on and Bokeh Lens. It’s a great way to find new photo editing apps, and you don’t even have to pay for them!