Welcome friends.Today I'm going to share with you some of my favorite photo editing apps for your smartphone. These apps will take your photography and your social media posts to a whole new level, so stay tuned.
The app in the number five spot is Adobe Photoshop Fix.
One of the pros to Adobe Photoshop Fix is that it's actually part of a whole library of apps and they're the industry standard. I've been using Photoshop since CS5 in 2010 so with this app you'll get regular updates. There's also Photoshop Express and Adobe Lightroom. Some of those apps will do editing with RAW files.Photoshop Fix offers a decent heal tool to remove unwanted items and to colorize or use spot color. You can even add a smile with a liquify tool or change other facial features, and when you're finished and you're ready to send it out to social media you can connect to behance which is their platform or other social media platforms of your choice. The reason why this app is ranked number five is because you have to make an account to sign in or use an Adobe ID. For me this brought up some privacy issues it was very difficult to find where i could opt out. Additionally the defocus tool, which is the blur tool, left shadows, even with lowered opacity.And the final con, on my small screen, pinching in and zooming out with my fingers didn't work very well. It would probably work fine with a larger phone or with practice. Similarly edge detection when colorizing using my fingertips was poor.
The app in the number four spot is Afterlight.
One of the major pros of Afterlight is the straighten and skew. This is a cool tool in addition to your normal crop and rotation.Afterlight offers great edge detection. When I use spot desaturation or spot color, it picks up the edges and it doesn't over color or over desaturate and flow into other areas where it's unwanted. There are lots of filters and there are many more in the paid version,even curated filters. I really liked light leaks and color shift. These presets change the hue and rotate the direction of light and you can increase and reduce intensity for some really cool effects. And when you're finished they offer lots of ways for you to share on social media. One of the cons of Afterlight, and it would have ranked higher except for this, is that there's not an updated android version. The last update and bug fix was in 2014.Some of the tools that I like to use, like spot color, are only available in the paid version. I feel that's unfortunate because I think that's a popular tool that many people would like to use.In this app there aren't many features that benefit portraits like a heal toolor a blemish tool.
Moving on to number three... Photo Editor-
.Photo Editor- with the dash -. Photo Editor- is a very simple interface with tools that are easy to use. There are lots of tools, even in the free version. These tools are often considered pro or subscription level in other apps. For example, they have a blur tool that other apps would charge for. The smart color tool has great edge detection, so if you want to do spot color it comes out looking crisp. It also has a meme maker unlike the first two apps that I've discussed. And it has a way for you to collect your images into a collage. Overall there isn't much not to like. One of the things I had difficulty with was downloading the stickers and overlays from the supply shop. I was able to use these tools when I took a new photo, but I couldn't figure out how to get them to download to use them on my photo roll of photos that I'd already taken. When I wanted to return to the previous menu I occasionally got stuck and couldn't figure out how to get back without closing the app and then opening it again. There weren't very many levels of undo. In many cases I just had to completely reset the image. But overall this was a really great app.
Before we move on to number two on my list of apps. Have you ever used any of the three I've already discussed?Let me know in the comments below and don't forget to ring the bell so you can be alerted to any new content.
Number two is a very popular app, it's called Snapseed.
Snapseed has true curves. They offer presets, but then you can also individually do your red, greens, and blues, as well as luminescence. One of the cool tools is selective adjustments and selective masking. You can use this to brighten specific areas of a photo. This app comes with awesome presets. This was where I had the most fun. There are presets for drama, vintage, grain, film, retro, grunge, black and white,and my favorite, noir, and they're completely customizable.So if you find a preset that you like you can then go in and tweak it even more. An additional pro is the head pose. When you use this with portraits you can actually change the direction that people are looking.How fantastic is that!! And last on the list of features that I liked the most was the ability to rotate the screen so if I wanted to work on my image by turning my camera to the horizontal position I could do that. One of the things I had the most difficulty within this app were the sliders at the very top of the screen. They didn't feel intuitive and for me they were difficult to use. One of the things that might actually make this app more difficult for some users is the complexity. If you use Photoshop or Lightroom then you would understand all the features that this app has to offer. But if you like to just edit some pictures on your phone and like to keep it simple, that complexity might actually be a drawback. Lastly the healing tool did not look natural to me. It left artifacts behind when I was finished using it.
And now we're down to number one drumroll please...
The number one app on my list is Pixlr.
Pixlr was the most fun for me. It might not be the best editor or have the most tools, but it was the one that I could play around with my photos for hours. The first thing I really liked was the double exposure feature where you can overlay photos and then use presets to get some really cool effects. I also enjoyed using the color boost in the blur tool. With this tool I could be extremely selective and choose just specific areas that I wanted to saturate with color. The splash tool allows you to do spot color. It's pretty flawless. I enjoyed using that one as well. This app has awesome effects, overlays,and styles. There are so many options of presets. Some of them are paid only, but many of them are a lot of fun to play around with. Everything from light tweaks to dapple to watercolor... any kind of effect you could dream of is pretty much available on this app. It also offers you a way to build a collage, or to use a template to create something that's more along the lines of graphic design. If you really want to use an editor for graphic design then make sure you check out my next article that's going to be about photo remixing and graphic design apps.There are very few disadvantages to working with Pixlr. First and foremost, the ads, but of course you could solve this problem by buying a paid subscription. I really like the sliders they were easy and intuitive, but sometimes they had a delay in showing the effect. And the heal tool was just so-so.It worked great on dust specks and small flares in my photos of flowers and objects, but it wasn't great on people. At least not in my experience, but it's still my number one choice of the best fun apps to use for photo editing on your smartphone.
So that's my top five! These apps can help you take your posts to a whole new level! Be sure to read the individual article I'm going to post. They'll go into more detail about each of these apps.
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