When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works

Home / News / 10 of the best photography apps

10 of the best photography apps

We salute World Photography day with a bunch of awesome photo apps to get those creative juices flowing

SwankoLab

SwankoLab

iOS £1.49

This retro effects app lets you mix up chemicals and flick on the red light, all from the comfort of your very own virtual chemical darkroom. It’s well worth visiting Uncle Stu’s seedy Photo Emporium (an in-app store) and spending the extra £1.19 for the extra chemicals with ongoing updates, but if you don’t want to splash out on extras you can still achieve great results. Surprisingly addictive and your lungs won’t suffer in the process.

Get it now

TiltShift Generator

TiltShift Generator

iOS, 69p

Spice up your photos and spew your creative juices all over your pics, with a host of effects for your snaps. This includes soft focus, blurring, vignetting, colour, brightness and contrast adjustments. Results are awesome, you get to explore your artsy side and your subjects can look like anything from tiny toy models in over saturated miniature to hazy dream-like characters.

Get it now

You Gotta See This

You Gotta See This

iOS, £1.49

Not just a cool name for an app, this is without a doubt something you should all have loaded onto your iThings. First off, it’ll save you from spending mega bucks on a camera with panorama mode (unless you don’t have an iOS device). It takes multiple shots while automatically stitching your photos together as you pan across, saving you the hassle of misaligning shots and screwing up the photo. Genius.

Get it now

Almost DSLR

Almost DSLR

iOS, £1.49

It goes without saying your iPhone isn’t going to replace your DSLR, but with this app it makes a bloody good attempt. It appeals to your inner control freak by forgoing the iPhone’s standard settings and putting a number of photo enhancing features at your fingertips. Choose the resolution, manually set and lock the focus and exposure, and have control over white balance. Grid lines help you align your shot, while controls for flash are also available. The only downside? There’s no zoom.

Get it now

Pano Android

Pano Android

iOS, £1.49

This unassuming app stitches together multiple photos into a seamless panoramic image. Only, unlike other panorama apps, you have to manually line up and stitch together you shots to create your panoramic masterpiece. So it’s not perfect, but if you like to be a bit more more hands-on with your photo-taking this’ll do nicely.

Get it now – iOS

Get it now – Android

Photoshop Express

Photoshop Express

Android, iOS, £free

Carry Adobe Photoshop in your pocket at all times – albeit a heavily cut-down version of the real thing. It lets you make those necessary image edits to give your snaps the glossy wow factor they should have had in the first place. A few quick adjustments can make a real difference to even the most sketchy snapshots and with Photoshop’s free 2GB of online storage at the ready, there’s plenty of room to get your creative hat on.

Get it now – iOS

Get it now – Android

PhotoGram

PhotoGram

Android, iOS, £free

e-Cards are the new way to bestow birthday cards upon your loved ones. Why waste time at your local card shop when you can whack four photos into one of the hundreds of available themes, throw in a message and send it to a lucky recipient either via email or social network. It’s also a great way to disguise your forgetfulness and failure to actually go out and buy a card.

Get it now – iOS

Get it now – Android

Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic

iOS, £1.49

The king of retro camera apps is still taking the lead as the most retro, despite many competitors trying to knock it off its pedestal. It’s not quite ‘real’ retro, but as we’re all too aware, real retro requires much more money than paying for something to live in your phone. A handful of film, lens and flash effects are on hand, but a quick Hipstapack purchase means you can extend your effects library and get a bit more creative.

Get it now

Apict

Apict

WP7, 79p

Everyone loves the spontaneity of instant snaps and while Polaroid cams have long been replaced as the must have instant camera, it doesn’t mean you can’t create their white-framed effect elsewhere. Enter Apict. In some ways it’s actually better than the real thing by letting you write info on the bottom of the Polaroid-style print. Unlike real Polaroids, you can put more of a personal stamp on your work by applying retro effects, cropping and rotating images.

Get it now

WordFoto

WordFoto

iOS, £1.49

Sometimes pictures speak louder than words. But when you combine the two, you get an image that reaches out from the screen, grabs you by the cojones and shows you exactly what it’s thinking. Just take an image from your library, add your literature and play around with the style until you’re left with an amazing typographic work of art.

Get it now

Also

World Photography Day special

Best Android apps this week

25 best sports movies ever

25 best plane movies ever

Profile image of Dan Grabham Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home