Download these apps to take better photos, do more with your photos, and share your photos with friends more easily, all from your iPhone.
Best camera is one you have, and for more and more people these days, that means the iPhone camera.
There are many photo iPhone apps out there, and they are not all equal. Here are a few photo apps that are worth downloading to your iPhone in order to take more interesting photos, do more with your photos, and share them with friends.
For more inspiration, check out this group on Flickr: “Photos taken with an Apple iPhone”.
Instagram lets your photographs be a social experience. It’s a little bit like FourSquare, Twitter, and Facebook… but the focus is photos snapped by you and others. Take a photo within the app, then scroll through several options of filters to get just the effect you want. When you post the photo, you can add a description and location, and it will be viewable by your followers. You can add contacts to follow and “like” and comment on each other’s photographs. Instagram. Free.
Autostitch
A great panorama app. Say you’re perched on the edge of a Greek island and you want to fit the entire scenery into one photograph. Take several photos using your iPhone camera, moving across your view. Then, inside the Autostitch app, select those photos in any order, and click a button. The app will automatically align and stitch the photos together into a larger panoramic photo, which you can then crop right away to eliminate any unevenness, and save to your photo library. Autostitch. $1.99.
ShakeItPhoto
This one is fun for the pure novelty of getting to shake your phone. Take a picture in the app or select a photo from your photo library, and then shake your camera. As you do, you’ll see the photo develop much like an actual Polaroid. It seems the photo develops faster the faster you shake your camera too. Just don’t shake it too hard! ShakeItPhoto. $.99.
Hipstamatic
Hipstamatic has a variety of filters that give your photos a vintage feel. You must take the photos within the Hipstamatic app, and the actual viewfinder the app gives you is quite small, which is just one drawback of a somewhat confusing user interface. But the filters are worth it. They’re beautiful and can turn an otherwise-regular snapshot into an atmospheric photograph. Hipstamatic. $1.99.
PS Express
The Photoshop Express app is good for basics: you can rotate, flip, straighten, and crop a photo. The exposure, saturation, color, and contrast may all be changed, and convert a photo to black and white. The app goes beyond the basics, though, and gives options for adding filters, effects, and borders. PS Express. Free.
Even more iPhone photo apps than these
There are many different photo apps for iPhone, but the ones listed above are a good place to start. You might discover that you like features of certain apps and dislike features of others, and then you can find more similar apps that fit your needs. It’s safe to assume that new versions of the iPhone will keep improving upon the iPhone camera, so iPhone photography will continue to improve. Most of all, have fun and take lots of photos!