There are thousands of photo processing apps available on the App Store, but many of them are not worth your time or money. AMELIA HUNTER looks at ten inexpensive apps that get the job done well.
Apple’s famous App Store has thousands of photo processing applications, but most of them aren’t worthy of your time and money. If you’re looking for good and not very expensive apps that can edit images, resize them, and add different effects and filters, have a look at our list of the best photo editors for the iPhone:
1. PicsArt
PicsArt, which was first designed as an Android app and came to the App Store not so long ago, is one of the most popular photo editing apps at the moment. Its Android version reached 35 million downloads in less than a year, and it was this unexpected success that made its developers start working on its iOS version, too.
PicsArt offers a lot of free photo editing tools (advanced ones like masks and corrections, and usual ones like frames, borders and so on) and cool filters. It also allows users to draw on their photos with different brushes, or add other graphics to them.
Today, PicsArt’s Android version has about 2 million unique visitors every day, and 4 million registered users (even though the app doesn’t require registration). It has more than 500,000 user reviews on the Google Play store with average rating of 4.7 (Instagram, for example, is 4.6, and Adobe Photoshop Express is only 4.0). PicsArt appeared on the App Store not so long ago, but it already has a lot of positive reviews there, too, so I’m sure the iOS version of the app will become as popular as its Android twin pretty soon.
Download: PicsArt at iTunes
Price: Free
2. Instagram
Instagram is another cool and very popular app that lets you edit images and share them via social networks. It doesn’t offer many filters (15 only, in fact), so it’s a good tool for those who need to edit their pics a bit and share them online (just keep in mind that you’ll need to create an account first).
Download: Instagram at iTunes
Price: Free
3. Filterstorm
Filterstorm is one of the biggest photo editing apps ever it offers as many features as most PC applications. With its help you can correct colors, reduce noise, sharpen images, convert them to black-and-white, and even use the Clone tool to get rid of unwanted things on your photos. You can even work with images in raw format.
Filestorm has great user interface, and the only problem is that it’s easier to use on the Apple iPad’s big screen rather than on the iPhone, though it works just fine on both.
Download: Filterstorm at iTunes
Price: £2.49
4. Adobe Photoshop Express
When I think of photo editing, what immediately comes to my mind is Photoshop. But, no matter how strange it may be, Photoshop’s iOS version doesn’t have as many features and tools as we’d like it to have. It doesn’t even have the Clone tool!
However, if you want to slightly edit your photo, crop or rotate it and add some simple effects, Photoshop is what you need. You can also play with exposure, saturation, tint and contrast I guess these are among Photoshop’s most used features among amateurs, so it’s a rather nice basic editor after all.
Download: Photoshop
Price: Free
5. iDarkroom
iDarkroom is another fast and useful photo processing app. It offers a number of color filters, exclusive effects (like Zoom Blur, Circular Blur, Old TV, Glow, Soft Light), ability to adjust contrast, brightness, saturation and color gamma, and much more. You can also use its basic editing features like crop or rotate, and use the app to share your images on social networks.
iDarkroom has lots of positive user reviews on the App Store, and it’s definitely worth trying.
Download: iDarkroom
Price: £0.69
6. Perfectly Clear
Perfectly Clear is the next among the best photo editing apps available at the App Store. It can help you make imperfect photos look nice and clear by either using one of 4 presets or playing with 12 different characteristics of the image. It can even change your skin tone, enlarge your eyes and make your teeth look even whiter. Sharing the final images on social networks is also possible.
Download: here
Price: £1.99
7. Camera+
Camera+ can be used to edit the images that have already been taken, or take new ones using its filters and effects.
It doesn’t offer hue/saturation adjustments like most other similar apps, but you can still have much fun with all those filters. And of course you can use the app to share images via Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.
Download: iTunes link
Price: £0.69
8. Best Camera
Best Camera is another basic photo editor that can let you quickly add filters and other effects to your photos and share them.
The effects aren’t named in this app, which makes it rather difficult to figure out which filter to use, but once you try all of them, everything becomes clear. There are many interesting effects and filters here to enjoy, but ¬£1.99 seems to be too expensive.
Download: from here
Price: £1.99
9. Phonto
If you want to add text to your photos, Phonto is what you need. It offers more than 200 fonts (and you can install others, too), plus you can edit your text, change its color, size, add shadows, rotate it and do much more.
Download: Phonto
Price: Free
10. Moquu
With Moquu, you can take photo sequences and make an animated gif image out them. You can also add different fun effects to your gif images and share them on your favourite social networks without paying a single penny for it.
Download: from iTunes
Price: Free
* Amelia Hunter is founder and editor of http://www.teqno-logical.com. Follow her on Twitter on @HunterAmelia