Todd SumamnoNext-gen smartphones have become so powerful that you can comfortably replace your bulky and expensive DSLR camera with a flagship smartphone holding 3 or more lenses. Then, computational photography takes care of the rest, producing outstanding results. If you were lucky enough to test Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, you would know this is no exaggeration.
With each new year, smartphones continue to take the role of a platform suitable for managing the educational curriculum, learning math, programming, languages, and the list goes on. When it comes to taking photos, smartphones have become outstanding, but what about editing them?
Unfortunately, it is one thing to take raw photos, and another to edit them to a satisfactory level. Even folded phones will suffer from low screen real-estate and inability to use a mouse’s precision to enact any photo-editing job within your skill range efficiently. Can you imagine tinkering with such a photo editor on your phone as your bulky fingers try in vain to track down and manipulate pixels?
However, it bears keeping in mind that professional, desktop software packages are overkill in many cases. If your field of work or hobby is social media marketing, e-commerce, or to buy an essay using writing service reviews, you would likely achieve the same results with a tiny photo-editing app on your phone.
As you may have noticed, for the last 3 years, machine learning algorithms have penetrated every area of life, from finance and education to accounting and news generation. Photo editing apps tend to use such advanced algorithms in the form of filters – smart presets that are devised to mold your image to exude a certain tone, no matter its original quality and setting.
Other than filters, photo editing apps can provide you with other basic features such as cropping, auto-collages based on a certain setting, and even control your camera’s shutter speed. With that said, let’s gather the most useful photo editing apps both for the Android and iOS platforms.
Prisma Photo Editor
Have you ever wanted to stand out from the crowd with a unique avatar that represents you accurately but in a highly stylized manner? If you want to skip the part of you standing for hours while an artist conjures your image on a canvas, Prisma Photo Editor is the app for you. By choosing between an impressive number of filters – over 300 – PPE transforms any photo you take into something resembling an artistic painting or a drawing.
Likely, you have already tried such gimmick with simple websites that make the same promise but produce horrible, unusable results. PPE is the diamond among the zirconium of such transformation apps. One of the few that actually work. And it works because of, you guessed it, AI/machine learning. By default, the app is free but only with a smaller set of filters/possible transformations. However, the features it does have for free are more than enough to determine its worthiness of staying on your phone.
Adobe Photoshop Express
If you are looking for a more advanced and comprehensive feature set instead of just one gimmick, Adobe Photoshop Express is a top-tier app for such use. Everyone knows about Adobe and its comprehensive range of software, from video editing to animations. The task of translating such a desktop software powerhouse into a tiny smartphone format is impressive.
Adobe pulled through by creating just the right balance between an intuitive interface and a more advanced feature set than usual for such an app: saturation, correction, contrast, borders, cropping, brightness, filters, etc. In addition to what you would expect from such a professional benchmark as Adobe, you will be thrilled to see Adobe’s smart filters in action – they auto-correct all the common issues like exposure and color temp.
Of course, all their services are now driven by Adobe Cloud, so only after a free sign-up will you be able to start using this powerful photo editing app.
Visage
If you don’t like the nifty gimmick of Prisma Photo Editor, but want to make your selfies look better, Visage is among the highest-tier apps for this task. As we age, we accrue imperfections, and they largely manifest on our skin – scar tissue, pimples, moles, blemishes, baggy eyes, double chins, etc.
To be far more presentable on social media, Visage offers easy retouch tools that output professional results. Seriously, over 10 years ago, fashion and lifestyle magazines would kill to have this app. In addition to removing the aforementioned imperfections from your face, you can also use Visage to integrate your portrait into an enticing background with additional effects to spruce up your social media appearance. As you can see, this app would be an excellent tool to spruce up your photos for CVs and job applications.
Lastly, there are other photo editing apps to try out: Adobe Photoshop Fix for editing your portraits, Photo Collage for whatever collage type you can dream of as this app has over 5000 layouts, and Snapseed as Google rival to Adobe Photoshop Express. Try experimenting with most of them for, at least, a week. Hopefully, this article served to educate you and persuade you that mobile photo editing is not only possible but more suitable for many purposes.
Brittany Maslo