Try these during your COVID-19 isolation
Top 5 quick photo editing apps + what they’re used for
This post will give you a high level overview of my top 5 photo editing apps. I use these photo editors for my Instagram, and this blog.
I’ve recently found I have more time on my hands since I can no longer wander about. I’ve since doubled down on my old vacation photo editing and content creation. I figured some of you might be doing the same, as I have received a few comments on my recent photos around what apps I use and how I do my edits.
First off, there is no app that does it all. Sometimes I use up to 3 apps to edit one photo.
Here are my 5 top app pics for 2020, including their cost. Following the links will take you to Play Store to download the apps. I’ve used all of these personally, and while nothing is perfect, I find these to be very useful additions to my photo editing toolkit:
- VSCO ($19.99/yr for 2 years)
- PicsArt ($47.99/yr)
- Pixaloop ($19.99/yr)
- Photoshop Express ($9.99/mo)
- Adobe Lightroom ($9.99/mo)
VSCO
VSCO is a tried and true Instagram classic. This photo editing tool suggests diverse presets for each photo you upload. I personally like to edit every photo differently. A picture is worth a thousand words, and each picture tells a different story. However, if you’re going for a consistent look and feel, you can stick to a single filter or themes of filters in this app. Here’s an example of a photo I’ve edited in VSCO when I was looking for a simple color palette (before and after).
VSCO has several added benefits to other editing tools. One of my favorite features is the “Recipe” tool. If you’re looking to consistently edit a few images, it’s a must-try. The tool allows you to save not only what filter you used, but any custom clarity, saturation, exposure, etc. adjustments you made. This is cheaper than Adobe Lightroom and I’ve found it to be nearly as powerful assuming you aren’t doing anything too extra with you photos.
Here are the other, more standard, editing features of VSCO:
- Exposure
- Contrast
- Adjust (crop)
- Sharpen
- Clarity
- Saturation
- Tone
- White Balance
- Skin Tone (works remarkably well)
- Vignette
- Fade
- Split Tone
- Borders
- HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness)
PicsArt
This app is just plain fun. It’s a bit pricey after the 3 week free trial, but I would definitely recommend starting your three weeks during this quarantine to try it out. This app has far more features than VSCO, so the price makes sense. You get fonts, stickers, premium support (they are quite timely with their responses), fun effects, automatic and manual background removal, lens flares, and so much more. I have noticed it is easy to go overboard in this app and end up with pictures that look nothing like what you originally captured. If you know you have a tendency to do that and it isn’t the look you’re going for, this might not be the app for you. Below I did a simple before and after. I chose the 1995 filter and used the “sketch” effect:
I would say the above edit is pretty laid back for this app. Overall, this app made my top 5 because it’s efficient enough to run on even older cell phones, and it has an incredibly diverse array of editing options. I can make pop-art style pictures with liquid overlays. It’s absurd how many photo editing tools are within this app.
Below are the key features of this app. Keep in mind that each of the following have subcategories and numerous options within them:
- Recent (reminds you what you’ve already tried)
- Tools (cropping, enhancing, rotating)
- FX (filters, sketch, blur, pop art, etc.)
- Beautify (eye size, wrinkle remover, hair color, etc.)
- Stickers
- Cutout (background remover)
- Text
- Add Photo (layer on different ones and play with opacity)
- Fit (to square)
- Borders
- Masks
- Free Draw
- Lens Flares
- Shape Masks
- Frames
- Callout Bubbles
Pixaloop
This is one of my favorite apps for boosting engagement on my photos. We all know that moving objects and videos tend to catch people’s eyes better than a static image. It’s the reason a bird flying by your window can be distracting. For more on this topic, check out this article from Social Media Examiner.
Pixaloop is my favorite, easy to use, lightweight app for adding motion to your static pictures. While the app comes with some editing basics like saturation and contrast, I would suggest doing your base edits in another app. I usually use Adobe Lightroom or VSCO before I put a photo into Pixaloop.
I only used two animation techniques in this example. I usually recommend 1-3, depending on which you choose, to ensure the animation adds to, rather than detracts from, your original photo:
This app made “Google Play best of 2019” for it’s animation features. So you’re not just taking my word for it ;). It’s base “animate” option allows freeform animation, freezing, and anchors to keep the still parts of your images still. Sky animation is a big part of this app and it has numerous pre-animated clouds and sunsets to overlay on your photos. It also comes pre-loaded with “element” effects to animate fire, water, stars, butterflies and so much more. One of my favorite ready-to-use options in this app is the “overlay” for rain. You can instantly take those perfect rainy day shots and add a minimal touch of motion. If you’re looking to add motion, but avoiding obvious edits, the camera FX can also add a nice touch by panning across and around your static images as if they were captured by a video camera.
While I don’t use this next option much, as most people have their phones on silent, there is a sound option to really give your static photos a video-like effect.
A lot of the features in this app can be used either subtly to to add motion (like rain or clouds), or luridly to give a PicsArt like feel to your animation.
Photoshop Express
Photoshop express is one of the quickest and easiest photo editing apps. It has more specific and unique functionality than VSCO, while still having a lot of built in filters. The filters fall into many categories, but I’ve found nature, charm, and splash to be my most used. It’s second defining photo editing offering is a set of overlays that includes raindrops, light leaks, and paper textures. All opacities etc. are editable which adds a lot of versatility to the options. As most editing apps do, this one enables crop, rotate and generic transformations for your images.
Similar to it’s much pricier and computing heavy counterpart (Photoshop), it offers all of the sharpen, luminance, dehaze, temperature, and other generic settings. You can remove blemishes using the Photoshop tool you’re likely already familiar with. One added bonus of this app is that it has a separate redeye removal feature for pets and people, so your furry friends can look just as fabulous as you.
In the example below I used a “splash” filter to narrow down the colors in my image. If you poke around my website, you’ll see I use this quite a bit:
Overall, if you were only going to pay for one app, and didn’t need anything too splashy (see PicsArt) for you brand/image, I’d recommend Photoshop Express. These are the main features, remember each one of these has many settings within it:
- Filters
- Overlays
- Crop/Adjust
- HSL and more
- Fix (red eye/blemishes)
- Text
- Stickers
- Borders
Adobe Lightroom (Android)
This photo editor has limited uses, but it’s very good at what it does. It reminds me of what my grandpa always says, “Any tool that does too many things doesn’t do any of them well.” While a lot of the above do decent filtering/adjustments, none of them can come close to the streamlined process of Adobe Lightroom.
This app empowers you to create your own presets. No more buying sets for tons of money from online influencers! You can edit one photo, or many photos all at once. This is a great feature for series of images that you’ll likely want to have the same aesthetic. If you edit a group but notice you forgot a photo, no worries. If you saved your edits as a “preset” you can apply it to any photo at any time.
This app also offers useful but limited functionality for cropping and spot fixes, much like the others aforementioned.
I believe the second strongest driver towards this tool is it’s selective edit option. This allows you to select (or deselect) parts of your photos that you want to apply certain filters or presets to. This can be very powerful for images that include sunsets. You might want to boost the oranges and yellows, without accidentally making everyone’s skin-tone look like the sky.
To show you an extreme version of what this app can do, I completely changed the color and exposure of the following image. I also added some grain for a vintage effect:
Overall, I love Lightroom and feel it’s a very professional and polished tool for presets and basic edits. If you’re only buying one thing, it wouldn’t be my first choice, simply because it’s missing some of the fun, eye-catching options most viewers like to see on Instagram posts. If you’re only editing for your personal and printing use, this would be a great purchase. It’s main features are here:
- Light
- Color (editing wheel to change hues)
- Effects
- Detail (noise)
- Optics (moire & defringe)
This concludes my cursory opinions on these apps. I’m sure I could write you an essay on each with benefits and how-to’s, but I’m hoping the above is enough to get you started. It is worth noting that I use the paid version of all of the photo editing apps listed. There are free versions, with limited functionality. I started out on the free version of all of them, and found I was using them often enough that they truly added value to my content. If you’re still hesitant to commit to one or several of my top photo editing apps, give the free versions a try.
If you have questions feel free to reach out here.
Thanks for sticking with me and I hope you found photo editing apps to try during this COVID-19 isolation. Stay home to save yourself and others. Sending best wishes to everyone. Find up to date info on the pandemic here. If you enjoyed this article and want to follow my adventures, follow me here (Instagram).
