When it comes to technical things, I am not what you`d call an “early adopter”, but more a “latecomer”. It’s something between “Do I really need this, and what for?” and “I’ll never understand all those details!” that keeps me resisting. It is therefore not surprising that only recently I am the owner of a smartphone … yes, and I even didn’t buy it myself.
Nevertheless I warmed up with it. Even more, I got really investigative in finding new useful or useless apps. Lately I’ve been asked by a few people what (Android) photo apps I use, and as I thought this could be interesting for others too, I’ll present you my favourite ones.
My basic photo tool is Adobe Photoshop Express. Of course it doesn’t have all the features you know from the “big one”, but you can still adjust your photo in size and especially important colour and light. In addition, there are also some preset photo effects and frames to choose from. But I think the Photoshop app is especially strong in the basics.
Another great app which I appreciate more and more is Snapseed. Like Photoshop you can use it for all your basic picture editing, but it has much more to offer. Additionally, it comes with a wide and very variable range of presets for creative editing, f.ex. different vintage, retro or grunge styles, a differenciated tilt-shift funktion and – what you don’t find that often – different black-and-white options.
If you’re mainly interested in the tilt-shift-thing Awesome Miniature is an app, you’ll probably have fun with, although it’s possibilities are a bit limited, if you don’t want to pay for the Pro Version.
Not for everyday use, but if you want to play around with your pictures and create some dramativ effects you can have a look at Color FX. With this app you can destract colour from the whole or parts of the picture and recolour them. Limited use, but fun!
A really fun camera app that lets you make almost artistic pictures is called Camera Illusion. It is not for picture editing, but for shooting them using different combinations of filters and effects, creating more or less distorted pictures. Filters to choose from are f.ex. X-ray-effect, ASCII-art, thermal, negativ, but also “classics” like vintage photo, sepia, lomo or black-and-white. In addition you can apply various distorting effect, f.ex. reflections, pixeling or – my favourite – light tunnel.
Do I have to say something about Instagram?! A similar app – although you can’t edit, just shoot pictures – is Retro Camera. You can choose between 6 retro-style camera presets, always with a black-and-white option. You have to love this app just because of it’s cute retro design. You’re virtually shooting with an old camera. A must for nostalgics!
Do you want to decorate your pictures or write useful or useless additional information in your pictures? Depending whether you want to use it for more decorative or more practical purposes, I recommend either Decopic or Skitch. Decopic – like its collage brother Petapic – is totally kawaii! If you want to give your pictures an Hello Kitty-Look, this is it: cupcake, glitter or heart stamps, kitschy frames … love it or hate it! With Skitch you can do more serious things: pointing on important parts of an image with arrows or mark them with a pen. I did never really need it, but it’s nice to have this app anyway.
If we’re already talking about decoration and retro style: Labelbox is a simple and in it’s functions limited app, with which you can add labels to your pictures. You can choose between different tapes to stick to your photo. You’re totally into masking tape and dymo? – That’s yours!
My two favourite photo collage apps at the moment are Photo Grid and InstaMag. The name tells: Photo Grid gives you various grid options, formats and backgrounds to collage your pictures. It’s easy and quick and quite versatile. If you like to create more hip magazine style collages, then probably InstaMag is the right choice for you. You can choose between different layout templates, and there are daily more. Not always is all of the text editable, and there is always this InstaMag barcode in one corner – both are a bit of minus points. It also comes with 24 photo effects that you can apply on your pictures … yes Lomo is one of them!
So much for now. I’m off for a bit then – to beautiful Cymru!
nadel&gabel 