Prisma has brought renewed attention to photography apps. Although Instagram remains the most popular app because of its filters and community, Prisma is doing great too and is likely to catch up. However, if you just don't want to play with filters there are tons of apps available for you that let you edit your pictures the way you want to.
Effects are fine, but if you want to edit the finer aspects of a picture, this is the best application available. Developed by Google, this app enables advanced photographers to edit their snaps on the phone.
The app offers granular editing for brightness, contrast, sharpness, saturation, ambiance, shadows and highlights. You can use effects of advanced editors such as healing, sharpening, brush and more. And, all the basic editing tools such as cropping, transforming, filters are available as well.
After Instagram, VSCO probably is the second most popular community among the photography apps. VSCO tries to merge the effects and advanced camera control in one app. It lets you shoot photos with manual controls of exposure, white balance and ISO.
Once the photo is shot, the user can apply one of the numerous effects (filters) and play with the picture. The filters here are very different from Instagram filters and offer a new look to the photos. You can also search the wide library of VSCO uploads with keywords.
It is impossible not to include the app which over time has become a synonym for photo editing. This app provides tough competiton to Snapseed. Besides the basic editing that photoshop is known for, the app offers cloud storage facility as well upon signing up.
The app has normal filters, premium filters (free on signing up) and custom filters which you can make using certain combinations. Photoshop Express offers more frames as compared to Snapseed. Apart from that, it gives you effects such as defog, temperature, tint, vibrance, and noise reduction. Photoshop Express is available both on iOS and Android.
Pixlr is famous for their online editing tools which give users vast amounts of freedom to edit their photos. The company has also released two apps for smartphone photo editing. The first app is Pixlr-o-matic, which focuses on effects rather than other aspects of editing a photograph. Pixlr-o-matic offers tons of frames and filters.
Pixlr Express, on the other hand, takes the traditional aspects of the editing very seriously. Its best known features are smart fixing and overlays. The app also lets you add text and stickers over the picture. If you have intermediate experience with editing photos, this should be fun for you. Both the apps are available on the web in Android and iOS.
This Android-only app's focus is on capturing the image rather than the post-production editing. It uses codes in the app to make the images look sharper. Also, it has a bunch of live effects that the user can apply while clicking a photograph.
Another of MX Camera's great features is its ability to take live photos like an iPhone. The user can even print photos and send it to friends and family as a post card.
With apps like Prisma and Snapchat dominating the conversation around mobile photography, these apps can give you more perspective on the subject.