Afterlight
Cost: free, with no real need to buy upgrades
Why I love it: Afterlight is easily the most powerful of the editing apps I have on my phone, giving the user the capability to overlay light and color (like in Photoshop), control space-bounded edits with a fingertip, apply color shift, and even mimic a film double exposure. The range of available free filters is wide, adjustable, and elegant.
What could be better: I wish this app could store images and recent edits the way VSCO can, rather than require the user to find and re-import an image every time.
VSCO
Cost: free, with no real need to buy upgrades
Why I love it: this platform has something of a cool-kid appeal, with its minimal interface, built-in social sharing network (which I personally don’t use), and filters that skew trendy rather than classic. One particularly cool feature is its ability to “hold” your photos in an in-app space called the Studio, where your edits are preserved and where your images will stay, even if the originally uploaded photo is deleted from your phone.
What could be better: this app would benefit from a serious cleanup of its filter options - with so many filters having fundamentally the same look, all the redundant options are an absolute slog to get through.
Snapseed
Cost: free
Why I love it: Snapseed boasts a wider range of editing categories than other apps, including some I don’t find particularly useful but are kind of neat to have (like “Retrolux” and “Grunge”…whatever those are). By far the coolest tool in the app is the “Tune” function, which makes use of a unique vertical vs. horizontal slider configuration to let you very intuitively change your brightness, saturation, warmth, etc.
What could be better: many of this app’s default effects are way too extreme and tough to control, and therefore not great baseline “presets” for a casual editor to be working from.
Canva: Graphic Design Creator
Cost: free, with no real need to buy upgrades
Why I love it: halfway decent photo editing apps are now a dime a dozen, but it’s still uncommon to find a solid tool that does what Canva can: generate logos and flyers right on your phone. I frequently recommend Canva to friends who run blogs or small businesses, as it’s a quick-and-easy substitute for a larger program like Photoshop or Publisher. Plus, it’s well plugged into current visual trends in terms of fonts, layouts, and “stickers,”, etc.
What could be better: Canva might be too user-friendly—it doesn’t really nudge the user to get inventive with templates. This results in many users creating and sharing only slightly different versions of the same graphic.
A Color Story
Cost: free to download, but leans heavily on in-app purchases
Why I love it: I fully admit I first learned about A Color Story from Taylor Swift, who started using its “color fog” features on photos during the Lover album release timeline. Indeed, color fogs and light effects are ACS’s strong suit - somehow they look softer and more palatable in this app than in others.
What could be better: the filters are not wonderful and not very refined, and most of the app’s features are behind a paywall (I wouldn’t recommend adding them).