Most users post their photos on social networks or share them with friends without additional post-processing. But applications for mobile photo processing are constantly developing and can offer many interesting tools. And even the basic ones are preinstalled by the system.
Steve O’Neil, a writer from the write my papers service, chose the seven best apps for editing photos from your smartphone.
Google Photos
“Google Photos is not only a photo storage and backup service but also a great app for editing. The available options start with the expected: cropping and resizing photos, adjusting brightness and contrast, changing saturation and warmth, and enhancing shadows in the image.
Where Google Photos is really ahead of the competition is with filters and features based on Google’s own algorithms: you can apply several automatic enhancements to change the appearance of your photos, create background blurs, and even apply brightness and contrast settings to the sky (if, of course, the app detects the sky in the image).
Apple Photos
The built-in Photos app in iOS edits images better than you ever imagined. Dive into the in-app editing suite, and the first option you’ll see is Auto Enhance, which applies smart filters to your image. Then you can manually adjust exposure, brightness, shadows, highlights, and more.
Apple Photos also has a useful noise reduction feature to brighten images, and straightening and cropping tools are available. The app has many preset filters that can change the overall look of a photo, and you can adjust the strength of the effect applied with a slider.
Snapseed
Snapseed’s polished and minimalist interface contains a number of photo editing tools and features that are quickly accessible to the user. But there’s much more tucked away in the settings section, from cropping and adjusting the perspective of images to several options for controlling brightness, contrast, white balance, exposure, and color.
Snapseed also includes a set of tools usually found only in a desktop image editor: tools such as a brush to correct imperfections and a lens blur option for focusing.
Pixlr
Pixlr is one of the most interesting and user-friendly photo editing apps that give you access to an impressive number of options. You can do everything from adding text labels on top of images to paint over the sky in a photo and replacing it with something else. Despite all the advanced features of the app, Pixlr is always easy to use.
You can pixelate, rotate and crop images, remove red-eye effects, apply a variety of filters, and more. If you’re stuck for inspiration, the app has several auto-correct options that improve your images using the most appropriate settings for your image type.
Afterlight
Spend a few minutes with Afterlight, and you’ll realize that this app is as much of a professional photo editor as possible. It has a minimalistic design, but it’s packed with features. Your photos with Afterlight will look better than ever. Publishing and exporting images to your phone or other applications are also very easy.
It will take you a considerable amount of time to explore all that Afterlight has to offer. The app allows you to change colors in an image, place text on top of images, create effects such as adding double exposures, flip photos, and support image layers.
Lightroom
You don’t have to have an active Adobe Creative Cloud subscription to use the excellent Lightroom app on your cell phone. It’s a powerful, intuitive image editor that can be useful in many situations-whether you’re looking for quick presets to improve your images or want more control over how they look.
The app comes with an impressive list of features: cropping, rotation, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, white balance, saturation, sharpness, blur, haze removal, and geometric tools, to name a few. Lightroom also lets you work with selections to edit just part of the image.
VSCO
One of the oldest and most well-known photo editing applications is VSCO. Whether you want to automatically enhance an image, apply one of the many filters with a single touch, or change the color balance, exposure, and contrast of your photo, VSCO has the tools to help you.
The two areas of the application where you’re likely to spend most of your time are preset (a carefully crafted set of filters) and correction (spot tools like blur effects). In addition to everything you’d expect to find in a photo editor, VSCO also has a comprehensive text blending feature and a skew tool.