Once upon a time the idea of editing photos on a phone or tablet was considered folly – akin to painting watercolours on a piece of sponge. But that all changed as screens got sharper and touch control more precise. Plus, with many of us now using smartphones as our main camera, there’s no shortage of raw material on them that could benefit from a bit of judicious tweaking before posting to Facebook or Instagram. There are hundreds of photo-editing apps out there clamouring for your attention, but the dozen you’ll find listed below are the best we’ve tried so far. Google’s take on photo-editing is typically approachable. Need to crop or rotate an image, or add a filter?
Apr 27, 2016 - Photos on OS X includes eight photo filters as standard to jazz up images with some. Or as an extension natively integrated in the Photos app Edit panels. The initial set of 15 includes 'Aged, 'Ancient Canvas', 'Derby', 'Red.
That just takes a couple of taps. Adding some great-looking text?
No problem – select from a large choice of styles and fonts, and the app arranges everything for you. But Snapseed goes much further than its rivals. There’s a powerful curves tool; filters can be tweaked and fine-tuned, as can text placement; best of all, Stacks enable you to view and adjust previous edits in a non-destructive manner. That’s a pro-level feature set, which makes it all the more astonishing that Snapseed is free.
On the desktop, Affinity Photo is a full-fledged alternative to Photoshop, but with a wallet-friendly price-tag. On iPad, it’s basically the desktop version with an interface rethought for touch controls and Apple Pencil. Let that sink in for a moment: this is desktop-level photo editing on a tablet.
Affinity Photo, then, unleashes the potential of the iPad – and, unsurprisingly, needs one with clout (a Pro or post-Air iPad). You must invest time, too, in order to master its many tools. But have some patience and you’ll soon be revelling in multi-layered photo-editing bliss, mulling over whether you still need a PC or Mac at all. Although wildly different from Photoshop in terms of its interface, Pixelmator is the closest thing you’ll get to Adobe’s desktop powerhouse on iPhone, and is a good bet on iPad if Affinity Photo feels intimidating. The app has fantastic configurable filters, tools for making adjustments to levels, and features for touching up and enhancing snaps. You can paint on the canvas with all kinds of brush and media types, add shapes and text, create and blend layers, and mess around with crazy distortions if one of your photos is otherwise unsalvageable.
Feeling uninspired? Pixelmator’s got you covered there, too, with its collage, card, frame, and poster templates. Speaking of Photoshop, Adobe’s decided against bringing its desktop giant to mobile. Instead, it’s hacked bits off of it and smushed them into focused apps that nonetheless provide photographers with plenty of power at their fingertips. Photoshop Fix is, as you might guess, all about quick fixes.
You heal blemishes, make subtle adjustments to highlights and shadows, or slather colour everywhere through finger-painting. On portraits, you can unleash the Liquify tool, which smartly detects facial features and lets you edit them. Fancy giving yourself an action hero jawline or a terrifyingly massive nose? Photoshop Fix will fast become your favourite app. This app sits somewhere between Snapseed and Adobe’s offerings. So while Polarr does include tools for making rapid adjustments, it also proves feature-rich when you delve deeper.
The interface is particularly well designed: in the adjustments section, simply tap a tool and plentiful configuration buttons slide out for tweaking all kinds of settings. There’s always a lot going on, but even on a smartphone, Polarr remains usable. It’s worth noting that some features lurk behind a paywall, but you get plenty for free. And for the pro-oriented, even Polarr’s top tier of 20 quid seems reasonable, given that it unlocks features on a cross-platform basis. The most focused editing app in this round-up, SKRWT is all about working with lens and perspective corrections.
For lens distortions, you get individual tabs for mobile, wide-angle, fisheye and GoPro cameras. With architecture shots in particular, applying corrections to horizontal and vertical lines using SKRWT can prove transformative. The app also bundles two further tools: MRRW skews photos and creates mirror images; 4PNTS has intuitive four-points correction tools. Annoyingly, each is effectively a sub-app, so you can’t quickly scoot between, say, SKRWT and MRRW. That niggle aside, SKRWT proves an essential part of any smartphone photographer’s toolkit.
By default, the Macphun extension gives 15 free filters. Sign up to the email newsletter to unlock an additional 15. All the effects can be applied with one click, with a variety of sketch, analog and vintage filters. Although other filter apps for the Mac exist, the elegance of the Macphun app is that it is an Extension, so you can access the editing tools directly within Apple’s Photos app. The app includes a masking brush to selectively apply the filter to just a portion of the overall image. The filters also feature sliders so you can customize the intensity of the effect on a per-image basis. The initial set of 15 includes ‘Aged, ‘Ancient Canvas’, ‘Derby’, ‘Red Stroke’ and ‘Twilight’.
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Each filter is visually distinct, offering a different artistic influence on the original photo. You can see some examples in the gallery: This slideshow requires JavaScript.