Tips for mobile photo editing and two killer apps for iOS and Android!

Whether you use an iPhone, an Android device or drool over Windows tiles, photography is now an integral part of mobile experience. And with excellent connectivity sharing these images (selfies or otherwise) has contributed greatly in making a photographer out of each one of us. But when we share, we always aspire to share the best possible image, and often find our mobile devices falling short of the prefect photograph that we always wanted to take.

This article will help you make any image perfect (the term is rather subjective though) with just two simple apps, ready to be shared with family and friends or just the whole world out there :)

I was never a huge fan of mobile photography, but this changed when M visited me while I was in the states and introduced me to her Instagram feed, and not to mention the in-built filters for image editing. I was immediately taken by the app and the filter and got addicted to it right away :)

Want to know more? Check out my feed on Instagram.

Clicked on my D5000, edited on my iPhone

However this post is not about Instagram, though I will soon post one on ways of getting popular on Instagram later. This is about editing images using your mobile device. I have evolved quite a bit on image editing over the past three years, and I will also try and show my journey through images here. However first things first!

Image editing on mobile phones is done for two kinds of images:

1. Images clicked on the mobile phone itself
2. Images clicked on your DSLR/ other cameras and then edited on the mobile phone

Images clicked on the mobile phone:

With the mobile camera war hotting up every single day, now you can take some absolutely amazing and breathtaking images on your tiny little device itself. This also works best when you want to capture a moment and share it immediately with your friends/ followers on different social medias - FB/ IG/ Flickr/ Twitter/ Whatsapp and so on.

iPhone 4 for picture, editing using snapspeed

Quick editing allows you to take an image and immediately share with new friend :)

I started mobile photography using my iPhone 4 and was absolutely bowled over by the potential of using multiple apps to enhance these shots. Even a small changed in contrast and saturation gave absolutely wonderful results, though back ion those days I used Instagram filters to edit almost every image I took. An average image could get transformed into quite a nice one within a few minutes. Of course I moved on from IG filters to other apps (which I will discuss soon), but my fascination with image editing remained.

Images clicked using DSLR:

The editing techniques of images clicked with DSLR are not different from those clicked on the phone directly, though its usually much more painful to transfer these from your camera to your phone. The latest DSLRs have wi-fi built in and so you can actually transfer these images using an app from the camera to the phone. Those with older cameras should also not lose heart, there are a few other ways of transferring images from camera to phone:

Clicked using my Nikon D5000, edited using snapseed

An image clicked much earlier, but later edited using snapseed

1. Using a wifi SD card (like Eyefi and Transcend wifi cards) which transfers images from any camera using an app on the phone - I use these and they are very very useful!
2. Transferring an image after downloading on your laptop - bluetooth, e-mail etc.

How to edit?

So here comes the key question - how to edit images beautifully on your mobile phone!

To keep things simple, I will recommend only two lovely apps which exist for both iOS as well as Android phones (sorry Windows guys, you will have to wait for some more time to get these).

The only advice I can give is to experiment and not give up if you can't get the effect that you wanted right away. Some of the best images that you see are often edited on multiple mobile apps and layered with a filter or two. I used be very conservative earlier, but not anymore even though my images have become more subtle and understated now.

Snapseed:

When I moved from IG to other editing softwares I simply fell in love with this app. The app is simple (might take a few minutes for first-time users to understand) and can really do wonders to your images. It allows you to make subtle changes or huge modifications to your images - you can really do quite a bit with it! Following are some of the images edited using Snapseed.

One of the earliest images I edited with Snapseed

Another one - clicked with Nikon D5000 and edited on snapseed

Vscocam:

Vscocam is the latest fad on Instagram and other image sharing websites right now. I think its popularity is phenomenal because its quite different from other apps that exist (in terms of some very subtle/ very faded filters it uses) and because of that its made a name for itself. As of now, this is my primary image editing software on the phone and I do only a few tweaks using Snapspeed.

Look how subtle the effect is with Vscocam

Another one with vscocam, the shadows merge beautifully

I find vscocam particularly useful for portraits, the effect is magical!

Some of the other apps I have tried out are PS Express, Whitegram, Framemagic etc and they are all also good for multiple other things.

I would love to hear from all who use other softwares for editing their images on the mobile. Let me know and spread the word :)

-- -- Siddhartha Joshi