Sure, you can edit your iPhone photos using any of the million desktop photo applications out there. But why bother with all that syncing when great editing tools can be loaded to the phone itself for just a couple of bucks? Sketch Me, Color Splash and FX Photo Studio are three great places to start if you want to add a creative twist to your photography while on the go.Sometimes it's easy to forget there are thousands of cool apps that extend the built-in features of your iPhone or iPod touch, and photography apps are one category I've been slow to adopt.
After all, I have a decent built-in camera for snapshots and video in my iPhone 4 already, and if I want to edit the photos I take, I can do it in iPhoto when I import them to my Mac ... or in Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) Photoshop Elements, or Pixelmator.
And yet, there are two reasons you need to start exploring camera-focused apps right now:
- The whole point of your iPhone or iPod touch is mobility, and camera apps provide you with on-the-go tools you can use right from the palm of your hand, and
- these apps give you focused tools to do cool things like turn photos into sketches.
As it turns out, I'm finding that I'm more likely to wildly enhance photos on my iPhone than even bother importing them into iPhoto in the first place.
Here are three that I consider must-have photo enhancement apps -- but know that there are many other fine apps that can achieve similar results.
If you've been stuck in a built-in Camera App rut, start here.
Etch a Sketch
Sketch Me!, an app from Bluebear Technologies, is available for 99 US cents at the App Store.
Sketch Me!
To get it started, you can take a photo from within the app itself or load one from your Camera Roll on your iOS device. Simply loading the photo kicks the app into gear, and it'll strip out the color and turn edges into what appear to be hand-drawn pencil lines. Often enough, the default looks great, but you can edit the results by tapping a little "gear" icon, which will give you slider controls for blur radius and effect strength, along with a split-screen option that will let you see the changes compared to the original as you make adjustments.
Along the bottom, there are six little circles that are easy to miss noticing -- these are preset sets of sketch types, and tapping them will sketch your photo in different ways. If you want to play with color, there's a color brush, but for the most part, I've ignored the feature. I go to Sketch Me! to create instant sketches. Oh, there's Facebook integration too, but the ability to take a snapshot of a cool event and then immediately sketch it and send it via the app via email to a friend can generate a nice surprise on the receiving end. To send it via MMS, you have to save the sketched file to your Camera Roll library on your iOS device ... and then MMS it from there.
World of Color
Color Splash, an app from Pocket Pixels, is available for 99 cents at the App Store.
Color Splash
The first thing you want to do with Color Splash is watch the built-in general tutorial video. Some dude with an interesting accent will walk you through the basic process, and with a little practice and patience -- as the guy says in the video -- you really can finger paint your way around a photo by zooming in and out. In addition to finger painting color back into a photo, you can toggle over to finger paint the black and white back in -- handy when you make a mistake.
Either way, there's an undo button, which you'll use until you get the hang of it. One more thing: It's cool to slowly push your finger along an edge and see color bleed back into the image.
Social media posting? You bet, for Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Emailing, yes, definitely, and for MMS ... head back to your Camera Roll to get that job done.
Special FX
FX Photo Studio, an app from Macphun, is available for $1.99 at the App Store.
FX Photo Studio
The filters give you things like crumpled paper, rough fabric, yellow glow, night vision cam, stencil posters, grunge rays, tilt-shift, blurs, neon lights, old film frames, and many more. At first glance, they are a bit daunting. Fortunately, the app is snappy and quick, so you don't have to wait long for the filters to take effect.
You will, of course, find several that you really like, and these you can add to your favorites, making it easy to find what you want. Feeling playful? Tap the "dice" button in the upper right and get a random effect. Tap it again for a new one. It's a good way to find surprising filters for a photo that you might not have considered on purpose.
You can also navigate through them by categories, like Art, Blur, Color Fantasy, Color Temperature, and the like. Again, handy. There's even simple filters, like "Photo Border 2" that gives you a white paper-like raised border effect. It's quite nice, actually. Tasteful, even.
Beyond the high-profile filters, FX Photo Studio is packed with some important other tools, like the ability to crop your photos, rotate them, or apply a gamma filter. You can save the photos to your photo album, a documents area, or the clipboard for pasting. Social media sharing gets built-in action with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, tumblr., and, of course, old-school email. Seriously, for $1.99, you can't go wrong.
All in All, You Need Some Photo Apps
Perhaps the most important takeaway of having a few of these kinds of apps is that they'll train your brain to remember that you can mess around with your photos. And maybe even frame them with some of these filters and effects in mind so you've got an interesting project right from the moment you tap the shutter button.These three are definitely worth exploring, but don't let that stop you -- there are plenty more apps in the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) App Store that are sure to cover your individual way of seeing the world.
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