The Apps to Turn Your iPhone Into a Pro Camera. Almost.

Thursday, May 22nd, 2014

Instagram got us all using filters on our photos, but its filters are often too heavy-handed, and if you just want to slightly tweak your color and brightness for a more natural photo, you’ll need to look elsewhere. The incredible VSCO Cam has been my photo editing app of choice for months now, with its vast range of filters and individual tweaks you can add to photos to make them far nicer than your original shots.

Then, the past couple of weeks, another app has stolen my heart: Litely. It’s filters are even more subtle, bringing out the original colors and details without making your photos look ‘shopped. They’re beautiful, and far lighter than Instagram’s filters—surprisingly enough, since it was made by the designer behind a number of Instagram’s original filters. Plus, Litely’s interface has a number of neat tweaks (pinch out over a photo to see the original compared to the new tweaked image, and move your phone around to see the rest of the image via parallax) that make it quicker and more fun to use than most other filter apps.

But filters alone aren’t enough. Dan Rubin just released a brilliant video on The Guardian that showcases a half-dozen apps—AntiCrop, TouchRetouch, Average Camera Pro, Cortex Camera, the aforementioned VSCO Cam, and the still-in-beta SKRWT—and shows how he uses them together to get beautiful shots in a number of scenarios. You can’t turn your iPhone into a dSLR, but put a few apps together like this and you can get quite a nice photography workflow to get the best photos possible from the camera you always have with you.

Check out the full video on The Guardian to see Dan Rubin puts these apps to use together to get surprisingly good photos from his iPhone, then go download some of the apps and try them out on your own. I’ve got my App Store wish list filled with them right now, and can’t wait to try out SKRWT.

Continue reading at http://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2014/may/08/how-to-get-best-photo-apps-smartphone-video

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