best photo apps

Camera360 is a remarkable smartphone photo app. It s perfectly self contained with a huge range of functions, no ads and no insistence in promoting paid content.
Touching the photo after applying a filter produces a nifty quick comparison of the before and after versions. One drawback is that the process of importing photos is slightly tedious, with one too many clicks involved.

Excellent user interface makes PhotoWonder one of the speediest smartphone photo apps to use. It also has a good collage feature with multiple layouts and photo booth effects. The filter selection isn t huge, but many are so well designed that you ll find them far more valuable than sheer quantity from a lesser app.

Vintage Deco is a brand new iPhone photo app designed to give your images a retro scrapbook feel. The filters are a bit clumsy and lean towards Instagram, but there s a lot of fun to be had by importing a picture just to play around with the nostalgic stamps and borders.

The combination of subtle filters and tilt shift function allows Magic Hour Lite (called Magic Hour Free on Android) to produce some truly unique results. The filters create effects that are far more sophisticated than some of the tinted, overexposed pre sets from other apps.
Note that this photo app forces you to crop your image to a square, which can either be a hassle or very convenient if you re uploading to Instagram.

Sleek and easy to use, LINE Camera comes with a solid range of filters, borders, icons and stamps. You can also add text to your pictures in over 100 fonts and 20 colours, making this free smartphone photo app one of the best for typography.

Tadaa lets you adjust the strength of all its filters, which is ideal for people who like fine tuning their photos with subtle effects. This iPhone photo app tries to get you to use its own social network, but you can still use all features without a login.

At first glance this iPhone photo app seems aimed at Japanese schoolgirls rather than discerning designers but Rakuga Cute actually contains some unusual editing functions which makes it an interesting addition to your photo repertoire.

An extremely slick interface and witty copywriting makes iPhone and iPad photo app Camera Awesome a delight to use. The functions and filters are grown up and sophisticated. The only inconvenience is that in the process of editing a picture you ll inevitably end up previewing demo versions of paid for features so there s constant backtracking involved if you want to stick with free content.

As you would expect from Adobe, the interface and user experience of the Photoshop Express photo app for Apple and Android devices is faultless. It fulfils all the functions you need for picture editing and will probably be the one you turn to for sheer convenience.
However none of the filters really jump out, and some are surprisingly naff for an app that comes from the developer for designers.

Aviary is a very pleasantly designed app that strikes the perfect balance between serious photo editing and playful photo decoration functions without looking bland or childish. Perhaps because it s quite new, the selection of filters and stickers are fairly small, so any future updates would give this app great room for play.