I’m often asked what camera I use (Olympus OM-D 5 Mark II & Olympus PEN e-pl7), but the tools of the trade are just the beginning. A lot of your creativity and freedom in photography comes down to post production, where you can play with the colours and create a certain mood or emotion through a photograph (for me that emotion is usually happy with loads of colour!) So today I’m going to share all of my favourite photo editing apps to help you get creative with your own photos.
But first of all, how do I edit my photos on my phone if I take my photos on my cameras?
Each of my cameras have wi-fi capability, meaning I can send my photos straight from my camera to my iPhone in just a few minutes. This way I can take better photos but still edit them on my phone, so that I don’t have to spend loads of $ on expensive software and can instead spend just a few $ (or often free) on phone editing apps. So here they are!
Photoshop Express
Lets start with an obvious choice: Photoshop Express. This app is created by Adobe themselves and has all the basic photo editing tools you will need such as cropping, red-eye reduction and a basic set of filters. While it is an obvious choice, I much prefer the filter options in some of the following apps. My favourite tool in this app is the “healing” tool which allows you to remove small blemishes.
Free in the app store.
VSCOcam
This is by far one of my favourite photo editing apps, although I do not use it to edit any of my instagram photos as I prefer bright and vivid photos to capture my travels and thus use VSCOcam for personal use only. The app comes with a great set of free filters and they’ve recently added a wider range of (paid) filters, which if you ask me aren’t really necessary but worth a splurge if they take your fancy!
Free in the app store.
Mextures
This was for a long time my favourite photo editing app, although nowadays I spend more time working for a great shot rather than using heavy filters to improve my photos. This is a really fun app and a great way to spruce up your photos, especially if you’re looking for gorgeous colours and fairy floss tones.
$1.99 in the app store.
Snapseed
Snapseed is one of the most popular photo editing apps and once you’ve downloaded it onto your phone, it isn’t hard to see why! This app is a great choice when editing colour, exposure and brightness without overdoing it. The trick to a great photo is to enhance the features just enough to make the image pop, but never so much that it looks edited! The filters are a little too traditional and heavy for my liking, but in terms of playing around with an image to slightly improve it, this app is a winner.
Free in the app store.
TouchRetouch
One of my blogger friends introduced me to this app and I’ve gotta say…. its a game changer! You know those times you take a photo and there’s just ONE person or object ruining the photo? You wish you could just erase them from the scene? Well now you can! Touch retouch allow you to circle the area you want removed and instantly morphs this object into the surrounding background. Magic!
$0.99 in the app store.
Camera+
This is the easiest way to turn your smart phone into a photo-taking device. Put simply, this app gives your normal camera more features and allows for more creativity when taking photos. I don’t actually use this app because I stick to my Olympus cameras, but it comes highly recommended from other bloggers/instagrammers. Available for the (somewhat comparatively hefty) price of:
$2.99 in the app store.