- Guest Blog
Everyone welcome my hubby, Jeffrey! He amazes me with what he can do with his iPhone and Instagram! Thanks for sharing your work and thoughts babe! Love you!
If someone asked me what the most used lens in my bag is, I would have to say iPhone.
Let’s face it, everyone we know owns a digital camera of some sort – point-n-shoot, DSLR or even a smartphone. But the smartphone has become the go-to device to document our daily lives. Simply because we never put it down. Leaha and I have 2 Professional cameras and without a doubt I get more shutter clicks with my iPhone when it comes to documenting life around me. Reason being I don’t always want to lug around a professional camera with me. Just having the stress of worrying about misplacing it or even worse damaging it . But I never leave home without my iPhone.
Now not just Apple but all phone manufacturers have recognized this recent trend and have made vast improvements to smartphone cameras in recent years. Nokia released the Lumia with a 41 megapixel camera! However, there are still some limitations to these phones. If you try to take a photo in low light situations or in a bright yellow room, the results might make you wish you had the DSLR with you. But that’s where a few good editing apps can come in use. With just a little bit of post processing time, you can take your pretty good stock camera photos and make them amazing. Maybe even create small works of art.
Now if you search for image editing apps in the app store you will be bombarded with thousands of choices. Lucky for you I have tried a ton of them! And I will tell you my all time favorite apps that I use to edit images on my mobile device.
SNAPSEED
COST: FREE
This is my all time favorite app. I defiantly use this one the most. Simply because it’s so well made. Every photo I take I process through this app first to make all my image adjustments I want before applying a filter/preset over it. Brightness, contrast, white balance, saturation, shadows, highlights…it does it all. You can even select whether to do this for the entire image or just a selection of the image. I will rotate and straighten images as well. Now there are lots of apps that do these same adjustments, but I haven’t found one with smoother controls that produces so nice of a result. The good feature with Snapseed is the vignettes. Again, other apps lets you do this but in Snapseed you have much more control of them. Snapseed also has some filters built in. Drama is nice for HDR type effects. Vintage is good as well for a more faded style. Listen I paid $5 for this app when it first came out and would pay $5 again because I use it so much. But the great part is Google acquired the app because it’s that good, and now offers it for free. Download it. Use it.
VSCOcam
COST: FREE to download, can buy in app filter packs
Most of us in the photography world know of VSCO – Visual Supply Company. They make great filters/presets for our professional needs. Well they also produce a mobile app that lets you apply some of the same great filters on your phone.. They specialize in a more film inspired look which I happen to like, especially for a digital media. As you’d expect can adjust the amount of the filter that is applied so go for a little or a lot to get the look you are going for. The app comes with a nice set of filters built in but you can purchase more through the app. I recommend you play around with the stock ones to see what you like, then you can go and purchase that particular set. It also has built in functions to make minor image adjustments (brightness, contrast, etc.) similar to Snapseed. But as I said above, I love the controls in Snapseed more that I do that work in there. Something this app has over Snapseed is the ability to add hues to highlights and shadows.
AFTERLIGHT
COST: $1
This is another good filter applying app. Loads of good filters and they all come included with the purchase of the app. They add new filters sometimes with updates which is nice. But the best part about this app is you can quickly apply multiple filters to the same photo in the same session. Other apps force you to export the image and then reimport it back into the app to apply another filter. Aint know body got time for dat. What I do is find filters that compliment each other and then make a “recipe” to apply to select photos.
A unique feature to this app is the Light Leaks and framing tools. Light Leaks were traditionally a mistake that would happen when processing film photos. However, they when controlled in digital format, they can often all cool effects to your photos. The framing tools let you frame the image with borders or shapes. It also has all the standard image adjustment tools.
[flock together] bottom left – Featured by Over
PHONTO
COST: FREE
This is my app of choice to add text to some of my photos. I like to do this just to have a little fun. I know I’m not going to blow up these photos to a canvas and hang them in my home for others to cherish, so why not make them graphically interesting. This app is my favorite when it comes to adding custom text layering simply because it allows you to control every element of the text. Choose the color, spacing, alignment, tilt, color gradient, shadow and transparency to name a few. The app comes with all the standard phone fonts but if you can’t find what you like, you can also load your own fonts from your computer.
Over is another good app to add text as well. Does almost everything Phonto does. But this is only currently on iPhone and costs $2. What makes them unique is the custom fonts and stamps they have come preloaded. They also offer other sets you purchase in the app.
Now, you may feel overwhelmed when trying these out at first because there are loads of filters to choose from. The trick is finding a few that you like, that give you consistent results for your style, and just stick to those. After a while you can add in 1 or 2 more to your toolkit.
Experiment. And have fun.
-Jeff
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