iOS apps (iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad)
Camera+ $0.99
This app actually controls the physical camera on your iDevice, further bridging the gap between iPhones and Nikons. You can manually control exposure, focus and white balance, and use regular digicam features like digital zoom, image stabilizer and scene modes.
Hipstamatic $1.99
Slick, perfectly exposed photographs have their place, though from the sheer number of downloads of this app, it’s clear the public wants warm and fuzzy analogue images. Choose a lens, flash and film and take snaps that bring back that loving feeling you get from plastic cameras of yore.
Adobe Photoshop Express free (also for Android)
Save yourself the $700 it costs to buy the full desktop version of the most popular image editing software. This trimmed-down version gives you top-notch features to fix your images – cropping, colour correction – and add creativity with art filters and borders. It also adds noise reduction, self-timer and auto-review features to your iDevice’s camera.
16.0 Mega Pixels Camera + Zoom $0.99
Although not a “true” 16 megapixels, this app does its best to optimize your low-res shots into sharp, frameable prints. The advanced timer slows shutter speed to a crawl, letting you capture great shots in the darkest of settings, while the BurstShooter mode can snap 25 pictures per second.
360 Panorama $0.99 (also for Android)
You don’t need wide-angle lenses to capture the whole view. Use this app to take jaw-dropping 360° panoramas of the entire scene around you so you can immerse yourself in it later. Every shot is GPS-tagged so you never forget a location.
Android apps
Retro Camera Plus $2.99
Android’s best clone of the popular Hipstamatic lets you choose between five cameras, each with its own feature-set of film scratches, vignetting, and cross-processing, all through a hyper-realistic interface that makes you think you’re holding an actual Holga.
Camera360 free
This well-rounded, frequently updated app lets you choose garden-variety effects from Retro to Night Enhancement while tossing in some super-modern filters to create HDR (high-dynamic range) and tilt-shift images. The Chinese producer claims the newest Skin Beautify function will let you say bye-bye to loneliness and hello to confidence.
PicSay Pro $3.99
For the ultimate in juvenile creativity, this app comes loaded with fake hats, hairstyles, eyes, moustaches, word balloons, thought bubbles and a slew of other objects to slap onto the people in your shots. It also enables cutting-and-pasting so you can, say, swap your head with Kanye West’s, and his with someone who can keep his mouth shut.
Blackberry apps
Photo Studio PRO $2.99
This photo editing app has 62 filters for amateurs looking to artify their images, including sepia, vintage, Lomo and sketch, as well as custom frames to finish off the effect. Expert editors will be happy to see more advanced features that let you adjust hue, saturation, RGB values and exposure level.
NightVision $1.99
It’s designed to enhance challenging night photos, whether you’re shooting the skyline, fireworks or your friends at a club. Five visual effects – Infrared, Alien Spectrum, X-Ray, Intensity and Colour flip – create stunning images, and post-editing features further brighten the scene, but sadly, not BlackBerry’s future.
