By Liyo Kikon
Everyone takes pictures on their mobile devices these days. Most people love taking pictures as a hobby and then there are the hardcore mobile photographers - And yes, those include selfie lovers! Modern cell phones have their own camera applications and most of these cameras have an effects panel where users can choose filters and other effects to spice up their images. However these applications are usually rather basic and they do not offer the additional features from third party applications. Please note that there are literally thousands of image editors out there, but these three are the ones which I consider to be the best. Keep in mind, this are my personal opinions. I have also left out certain applications like snapchat since they focus more on videos.
So, here are some apps for those of you out there who simply take pictures on your phone and you want to enhance those images to get the professional-ish look.
Instagram
It is the mother of all photo apps and for most people, its the only one you need in your phone. With a whole lot of custom filters to make your photos look beautiful, but filters aren’t what makes instagram popular. It is the ability to share your photos with the world. The best part about this app is the ease of use since it makes really great use of minimalist design and simplistic user interface. The sign up can be done easily with just a few taps if you have a social networking account such as twitter or facebook and posting your pictures is as easy as updating your status on facebook. Instagram gets it all, and it is obviously on the top of the list for the photo enthusiast.
The Photoshop Family
I am obviously talking about the application which became so powerful that it is now considered as a verb. But when it comes to mobile phones, the two major players are Photoshop Express and Photoshop Lightroom. Lets start off with Express. Photoshop Express is a master of filters along with useful features such as crop, straighten, rotate, flip, adjust color, remove red eye, noise reduction, defog and other enhancements. There is also a share button where you can easily upload and share your finished photos to Instagram, facebook, whatsapp or any social platforms. If you are a lover of filters and retouching, Photoshop Express is the one for you.
While Photoshop Express may be the one I use if I want to make quick changes and post it somewhere, Photoshop Lightroom is the one I use when it comes to serious editing when you are away from your computer. Although it is not even close to the power of the desktop version of Photoshop Lightroom, the mobile version can definitely do a decent job and it can do a lot more if you have an android phone with ‘raw’ image capturing. But that’s not all, it supports cloud sync, which means you can access your photos from any of your devices, for example, you can take a picture on your DSLR camera, upload it from your desktop and finish the editing on your phone. Actually, I wouldn’t recommend doing that since the Photoshop Lightroom for desktop has a lot more muscle, but in rare cases when you are in a hurry and you need to finish editing that awesome picture of your morning breakfast, you can simply upload it to the Adobe Creative Cloud and easily finish editing on your phone.
There are countless photo editing apps but nothing is as unique as Prisma. While most people saw Prisma as an app which can turn you into a cartoon image, I on the other hand, being a developer, was blown away when I heard about their artificial intelligence system for photo editing. Yes, it uses an artificial intelligence to analyse your photo and applies the art style accordingly. The biggest drawback with this system is that you will need an active internet connection since the photos have to be uploaded to their server for processing and this can usually take a long time, but the end results are really impressive since the app will turn your photo into a cool piece of art. There are lots of art styles available such as Udnie, Curtain, Mosaic, Heisenberg, Curly Hair, Gothic etc. and the best part is that even if you use the same art style, they will look different each time you use a different photo since the tiny robot slaves in their central server will analyse your picture and create the artwork accordingly.
Other apps worth mentioning are Autodesk Pixlr, PicsArt, Vsco Cam, PixelWakker and Facetune.
