We often think of photography as an art that starts with holding the camera and ends with pressing the shutter button. But really, the creative process goes beyond that moment. Whether it’s vacation photos or taking product photos for e-commerce, editing can make or break a photo.
If you typically use your phone to take photos, it’s a good idea to base your workflow around one or two photo-editing apps. But which of them is worth adding to your gear?
In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at some of the Best photo editing apps you should download right now.
Adobe Photoshop Express
Photoshop is a brand name so close to image editing that it already has an entry in the dictionary. Although this version of the popular software is a much simpler version of the desktop app, Photoshop Express still offers a long list of features for editing.
Along with all the usual exposure and color adjustments, Express gives you the ability to choose specific parts of your image such as saturation, color balance, contrast, and more. Fans will also enjoy the curve adjustment.
Retouching is another strength of this app, with tools that allow you to change facial expressions, the angle of a person’s head, and remove unwanted blemishes.
On the creative level, Express provides a selection of filters, a collage maker, multiple borders and text tools with different fonts.
Ironically, Express isn’t the fastest app — but it does offer a complete toolkit for editing photos.
Snapseed
You can use this application from Google for photo editing, such as retouching photos, improving photo quality, and including photo brightening feature.
What’s more interesting is that you can get all the features available in the Snapseed application for free.
However, the Snapseed app does not support automatic saving to the cloud.
Facetune Editor
Of course, we don’t just take pictures from the rear camera. Facetune is one of a new generation of photo editor apps designed to help us improve our selfies—though you can use it on regular human photos, too.
As the name suggests, Facetune allows you to smooth skin, remove double chins, and basically give yourself a complete photographic facelift. It can also work on your teeth and hair.
If you want to be more realistic, you can add digital makeup or just use tools to remove pimples. Similarly, Facetune allows you to remove unwanted objects in the background.
Canva
Canva has become a very popular photo editing app with a lot of functions that people can use, and the desktop version is very powerful along with the mobile app.
Along with video features there are options to edit images for social media posts and even create professional banners and backgrounds for your social media presence. There’s a simple background remover, and a photo grid for adding collages. Canva has many templates that make it easy to add images together and create a professional look. Canva allows you to create an account and then access your designs from multiple devices.
Canva has stock images and graphic elements which means people can create graphics, invitations and more from scratch, even if they don’t have a lot of images on their device.
VSCO
VSCO has a lot of different features compared to the other apps on this list, so it can provide more options for editing things like landscape images.
For example, there is a “Grain” feature that allows people to smooth out the texture of the image and add a grainy look to make it look older than it actually is.
VSCO has a lot of presets, and unfortunately you have to pay for some, but there are 16 available without any payment. The presets can make images look very different.
The built-in camera option has a built-in GIF maker as well as many different effects that can be added, and the camera options include burst, retro, and prism, giving different ways to take the pictures.
Prisma
Converting your photo into a painting in Prisma is easy and just a matter of one click.
Painting styles are named after art techniques such as Dallas, Mosaic, or Gothic or artists such as Thota Wickenton or Daryl Farrell.
You can also clip the background to automatically apply the style to just the person in the photo and leave the original background. After applying the desired painting style, you can choose from different frames to put your edited photo in the right light.
Additionally, you can control the intensity and saturation of the effect on the person or do some more background touch-ups to match the new image.
One downside to Prisma is that to access the photo editing app you have to first subscribe to their service and then manually cancel the 3-day free trial period.
Overall, this photo editing app is very straightforward and easy to use. However, automatic subscription may not be to everyone’s liking, especially when you easily forget about canceling subscriptions.