Top 10 Photo Editing Apps

The world is a wonderful place and if you’re constantly on the go taking photos with the cameraphone in your pocket (or let’s face it, maybe you’re one of those people that takes all their photos with an iPad), you’ll be wanting to edit them before you upload.

Here we take a look at the top 10 photo editing apps, split into ‘fun’ and ‘pro’ – for obvious reasons as you’ll see below.

PRO

1. FX Photo Studio HD
iOS
Price: £3.99

This really is a great app for photography fanatics. With so many easy ways to enhance your pictures to a professional standard, it’s easy to see why this app has been causing a stir.

Although listed at £3.99, which may be off-putting to some, it could quite easily make all your other photography apps redundant.

With over 190 photo effects and filters, all with excellent usability, this app allows you to apply effects to just part of the image, and not just all of it, giving an extra edge to its creative potential.

2. SnappyCam Pro
iOS (iPhone and iPad)
Price: £0.69

Make sure you’re never too late in capturing that perfect shot with this high-speed camera app.

Just like when shooting with a DSLR, SnappyCam Pro allows you to simply hold down the button to take a rapid sequence of photos – up to 60 photos a second!

Developed by the founder of SnappyLabs himself, this app is actually surprisingly impressive, allowing you to capture truly great action shots. And once captured, it is a simple process to discard the unwanted images and keep the rest

Images can be exported as animated GIFs or even videos, and for supported devices there’s also focus and exposure editing.

3. VSCO Cam
iOS and Android
Price: Free

VSCO Cam is an integrated photo editor that allows you to find and follow other creatives from around the world and post your photos.

The VSCO Cam image tools allow for fine-tuning of images with exposure, temperature, contrast, crop, straighten, fade, vignette, and more – giving great results.You can even use the app to select photos to sync and edit across devices.

There are also an array of preset packs available for you to purchase in the in-app store should you want to experiment further.

4. Photoristic HD
iOS (iPad)
Price: £2.99

Photoristic HD is an iPad-only photo editing app that’s packed full of all the right features, without being bogged down by too many pointless extras.

The photo editor on this app features all the normal image adjustment tools – vibrance, exposure, white balance, saturation, contrast, highlights etc., with the usual colour controls and greyscale options.

It also has a large selection of Instagram type presets for the less adventurous among us. It’s really easy to use, process times are minimal and it can deal with images up to 20 megapixels in size.

Although it’s not free, it’s a good quality, basic set of genuinely useful photo tools for the iPad user.

5. Pic Lab HD
iOS and Android
Price: £1.49

PicLab HD is a cool app for making those ‘life inspiring’ images that you see everywhere these days.

Simply select a photo, add a filter, then add a suitable typeface. This app could actually be of some use to designers or creatives who want to very quickly throw an idea at a client.

As well as being able to add typography – you can also layer illustrations or other design elements on top of the images and words. The app gives you control over fonts, size, positioning, opacity, rotation, colour etc.

All the layers can be edited. As well as being able to use preset photo filters and adjustment tools, you can fine tune the brightness, contrast, exposure, saturation, and other standard image controls to get your vision looking just right.

 

FUN

1. Facetune
iOS and Android
Price: £2.99

Facetune is perfect for the selfie obsessed among us as it allows you to retouch and tweak images to your heart’s content. Although the level of detail you can get into on the retouching is very time consuming, it does yield great results.

Facetune allows you to precisely remove freckles, blemished skin, bags under your eyes or even go the whole hog and alter your images in a Photoshop-style: realigning jawlines, hips or noses.

As a specific photo editing app it is obviously limited in its application, but then you would only be purchasing it for one thing, and that it does well.

2. Brushstroke
iOS
Price: $2.99

Brushstroke turns your real life images into beautiful watercolor-like paintings. The process is very simple and after a few seconds process time, Brushstroke will create a freshly painted picture that can be further altered with different brush styles, colored paints and differently textured canvases.

Have a play around with this fun app and see what colourful creations you can conjure up.

3. BeFunky Photo Editor
Tablets
Price: Free

The recently updated BeFunky now allows you to layer an unlimited number of effects and edits, and also undo them. You simply control the amount of each edit you make and then the app allows you to tweak how they are added.

The interface of the app is simple and easy to use, allowing you to get some interesting looking images in no time at all.

This latest version promises new effects and some even more powerful new editing tools.

4. Photo Warp
Android
Price: Free

Photo Warp allows you to take a picture then warp and bend with the simple swipe of a finger. You can use it to make yourself skinnier, enlarge certain areas or generally make some amusing looking faces with it.

This app features a warp tool that moves pixels around as you drag the cursor, a ‘pinch and bloat’ tool and a ‘reconstruction brush’, which gradually resets the picture to its original state as you brush your finger over it.

For a basic app, fast and responsive real-time manipulation of images has never been as much fun as this.

5. Cupslice Photo Editor
Android
Price: Free

Cupslice isn’t as features heavy as some of the other apps listed here, but it’s a photo editor with a little more style and simplicity.

Along with your basic editing tools it comes with more than 50 effects to get you started and more can be added along the way.

It also includes a number of stickers you can add to photos and this number is increasing every week. It’s a nice, simple app that should suit the needs of most people, and is great for sharing a simple feeling with loved ones.

All clued up on the latest apps? Try our quiz!