Amazon-owned digital photography site DPReview.com recently published a quick list of some top mobile apps for digital photography. Android and iOS App Tools For Photographers: Digital Photography Review.
While their list is a great, I have my own set of tools.. here’s what I roll with in the “Photography” category of my Apple iPhone 4 running iOS 5.
- Camera+ – The classic and most powerful supplemental photo taking and filter-based editing app. Camera+ does so many things, it’s recently replaced a couple of other apps: Photo info – it tells me where/when/how photos were taken, and if they have GPS coords embedded, plots the photo on a map. Photo cropping, enhancements, filters, borders, titles – great filters, with an optional film effects package upgrade. Photo taking self timer, stabilizer, and lightening quick startup. Flashlight – by using the flashlight photo taking mode, Camera+ has even taken over as my go-to flashlight app for my phone.
- 360 Panorama -Uses the built in gyro/accel hardware of the phone to automatically create a panorama on the fly as I swing my phone around a scene. It’s not the absolute highest quality panorama, but it’s quick, simple, and effective. The gyro-guided viewer function is a cool “wow” feature too.
- Autostitch – For more complex or higher quality panoramas, I use Autostitch. Take a series of overlapping photos – of a whole scene, or a specific detail, feed them into Autostitch, and watch as the app pieces are aligned and blended together. It takes considerably longer than 360 panorama to put the pano together, but the results are solid.
- Pocketbooth – The most fun you can have with the forward facing camera on your phone in with Pocketbooth. Load up the app, hold your phone out in front of you and your friends with your heads smooshed together into the frame, and out comes a classic looking 4-up photo strip, complete with border effects, vignetting and variable colors. And before your amazed friends can say “ooooh, can you send that to me?!”, you’ve already hit the convenient “email” button and zinged off a copy.
- PopBooth – Love taking photostrips, but with you had the real physical printed piece of paper with the photos, instead of a fleeting email? Enter PopBooth. Same concept as PocketBooth, but this time you give the app a few addresses, some cash ($2.99 per two strips), and 3 days later two nifty photostrips show up at your door.
- Simply Postcards – On the same vein as PopBooth, Simply Postcards transforms your digital photos into real world goods. However this time, its one photo, on a full bleed, full color postcard. The actual app UI/UX is terrible, but the end product is great. Also worth mentioning are Postagram which is more hip, but sends square popout cards (versus full bleed), and Cards from Apple, which provides very high quality greeting cards.
- Photoshop Express – For those nitpicky photo fixes that hipster filters just won’t fix, Photoshop Express does the trick. Granular control over color, lighting, and cropping.