My Five Favourite iPhone Photo Apps
Whether you’re a casual photographer who documents snippets of your life on your phone or a seasoned photographer who loves to whip out your “big” camera to artfully create pictures, I think we can all agree that the act of taking photos is deeply embedded in our present-day lives. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of photo editing apps out there designed to help you boost and manage your images, which means it can be overwhelming trying to figure out which ones would be worth your time and money. Below, I’ve listed the five apps I use religiously to keep a handle on the number of photos stored on my phone and to edit my photos in a way that is reminiscent of how the moment felt when they were taken.
1. A Color Story
A Color Story is hands down my favourite photo editing app. The filters do an incredible job of brightening and removing grey hues from your photos, which you won’t even realize was an issue until you start using them. Their filter collections have been designed by both the creators of the app (Elsie and Emma of A Beautiful Mess) and a wide variety of Instagram and blogger personalities who are known for their unique editing styles. There is a filter for every mood and season. My personal favourites are At Home, Fawn, Interior and On The Road, and my favourite effects pack is Texture. The tool selections mirror those in Lightroom and the effects are really fun for adding visual interest. The app itself is free while each pack of filters, effects and tools varies in cost. There’s also the option to purchase a monthly or yearly ACS+ membership which gives you access to every feature on the app (I haven’t personally done this). The cost of the filter packs is well worth it, especially if you use Instagram for a small business or aesthetics. It helps you maintain consistent edits on your photos (you can save editing steps as a custom filter) and there is a grid section where you can see what your edits look like against the rest of your grid if you add your Instagram account handle. This app has no comparison, in my opinion.
2. Cleen
Cleen is a free photo deletion app that comes in really handy if you too have thousands of photos stored on your phone that you need to sort through. You might be asking yourself, “Doesn’t my phone have the ability to delete photos without the need for an app?” Well… yes, but this app lets you swipe down to trash photos, left to keep (labeled Later) and up to favourite a photo, which makes for extremely fast deletion once you get into the flow. It’s perfect for when you need to delete a ton of photos off your phone quickly and makes the process a lot less frustrating (ahem, deletion limits on the iPhone, I’m looking at you).
3. Lightroom Mobile
Lightroom is the industry gold standard of photo editing tools and lucky for us, the mobile app is completely free. There’s a bit of a learning curve but once you get the hang of it, you’ll never want to live without it. It lets you edit very targeted elements of your photos from simple changes like exposure and sharpness to more complicated corrections such as changing shades of blue, softening skin texture, and removing unwanted objects. Another perk of this app is that when it comes time to saving your edits, you can choose to save a smaller version of your photo, which makes it more compatible with sharing online (if you’ve ever posted a high quality photo to Instagram that ended up looking fuzzy, it’s because it doesn’t like large files) and ensures it takes up less space on your phone. Whenever I upload photos to my phone that were taken on my Canon, I head straight to Lightroom Mobile to make basics adjustments like straightening the photo and shifting the highlights, shadows and specific tones, and I then export it as a smaller photo before taking it into A Color Story for further editing. Here’s a video walkthrough that gives the general gist of how to use the app (of note: the highlights and shadows function has since changed but the rest remains the same). If your camera has the function mentioned in #5 below and you’re taking photos for your own personal use, you can get away with using Lightroom on your phone only, instead of having to purchase a monthly subscription through Adobe.
4. Touch Retouch
This app is a miracle worker when it comes to removing unwanted distractions from your photos. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying that I find it much more effective at removing objects than Lightroom Mobile is, not to mention it’s a lot easier to use. This app costs $1.99 USD but if you’re keen on eliminating distractions from your photos to create cleaner images- I use it to remove anything from wall sockets to crumbs on a table to garbage on the shoreline - it’s worth the $2 price tag.
5. Canon Connect/Nikon Wireless Mobile Utility/Sony Imaging Edge/Olympus Image Share/fujifilm camera remote
Family and friends often ask me how I am able to edit the photos I take on my Canon while traveling or away from my laptop. My not-so-secret weapon is the Canon Connect app. It allows you to create a wi-fi connection between your phone and camera so that you can view and download photos from your dSLR straight to your phone for editing and posting. Ah, modern day technology! There are some photographers today who ONLY use their phone to edit photos because it eliminates so many of the lengthy steps involved in editing on a computer. Downloading this app for your respective camera brand is a MUST if you do not own a computer or do not wish to purchase a monthly subscription to Lightroom.
Another really handy feature of this app is being able to take photos with the touch of a button on your phone. You can view the scene you are composing on your phone screen, adjust the camera settings remotely (have I mentioned I love technology yet?) and then snap the photo. My favourite way to use this is setting the 10-second timer so I have time to compose the shot and then hide my phone out of sight. There’s even a countdown that pops up on your screen so that you know exactly when the photo will be taken. This is a game changer for getting yourself in front of the lens without having to set the timer on your camera body, run and settle into your scene, and then get back up to check if you nailed it after every single shot. If you have shaky hands, you could even use this function to help you avoid blurry photos caused by camera shake by propping up your camera and releasing the shutter on your phone. And bonus: the app eliminates the need to purchase a separate remote.
Your camera model has to have the wi-fi capability in order to use this app (any camera body made since at least 2015 should have it) and it’s a bit of a pain to set up, but once it’s done, you’ll never have to set it up again. You simply turn on the wi-fi function on your camera, search for the name you gave your camera’s wi-fi signal in the available networks on your phone and voila! Each camera make and model has a different set of instructions for how to set up and use this connectivity - a quick search on YouTube will populate a tutorial on how to get it going.
I hope this was helpful. If you’ve discovered any photography related apps that you can’t live without, please share in the comments below!