Pixel art: the 7 best creative photo editing apps for iOS and Android
Find out how to turn your snaps into chin-strokable works of art...
Let’s face it, the world’s a bit bored of seeing the warm fuzz of Instagram’s Clarendon filter, even if it is perfect for your #sunset posts.
To really dazzle the eyeballs of your social following you’ll need to some next-level photo art apps – and luckily we’ve gathered the best new ones for iOS and Android here.
Whether you want to turn your snaps into abstract Cubist masterpieces or see them transformed into little oil-based Cézannes, these are the apps to have on your digital easel…
Fragment (from £1.79)
We’re very much in modern art territory with Fragment. This app shatters your photo, making it look like it’s behind a glass sculpture covered in mirrors.
Any chosen effect can be manipulated in real time, to adjust angles, foreground and background blur, and outlines. It’s mesmerising – and a long way from digital watercolours.
Stuff Says: ★★★★✩
Percolator (£2.99)
Ignore the coffee angle – that’s just about ‘brewing’ the special effects. Really, Percolator is all about mosaics: images are transformed into an explosion of circles.
Grind, Brew and Serve menus let you fiddle with the result, which can be tweaked to resemble anything from classical art to cutting-edge graphic design.
GeometriCam (£2.99)
If you believe art should avoid all that messing about with paint and be more regimented, you’ll love GeometriCam.
It reworks photos and videos as geometric compositions – all dots, sharp angles and circular vortexes. It’s just the thing if you think you look better in 8-bit colour and with a nose so angular it could take someone’s eye out.
Storyboard (£free)
More a proof of concept than a finished app, this experimental offering from Google takes a video and transforms it into a comic strip.
The stills it selects can turn even the most mundane clips into something entertaining or terrifying. And if you don’t like what the app comes up with, drag downwards to refresh and it’ll have another go.
Prisma (£free + IAPs)
If you always fancied yourself as a living Chagall painting – or that unhappy-looking chap in The Scream – now’s your chance.
Prisma converts photos and videos into anything from classical art to Manga. The results are convincing, there’s a built-in social network for showing off, and an IAP (in-app purchase) lets you export in high res.
Oilist (£2.99)
This one has the most traditional output, mimicking oils on canvas, but what you get is also a living painting. Load a pic, and Oilist starts adding brush strokes… and never stops.
It’s like a little Cézanne is trapped inside your iPhone, living a Groundhog Day existence until you mercifully shut down the app to faff about on Facebook.
Retrospecs (£1.99)
If you’ve ever wondered what your snaps would like look like after being run through a Game Boy, ZX Spectrum or Teletext, then Retrospecs is for you.
It’s capable of aping virtually every vintage graphics style under the sun, and can turn your videos into vibrant glitch-fests as well. With the option of creating your own filters too, it’s as much a creative toolbox as it is a simple nostalgia-fest.
Craig Grannell
Contributor 
