Recommended Apps

With all my photographic wandering and explorations over the years, here are the iPhone apps that I keep coming back to for photography post-production.

Image Blender allows you to blend two images from your Photos app using a slider. This primary functionality is simple and easy to use. But if you want to get more complicated, you can use blending modes and layer masks.

Leonardo is a full-fledged layer-based editing tool.

Lo-Mob has some of my favorite black and white filter effects. Unfortunately, it has not been updated to work with the current version of iOS, the iPhone operating system (hint, hint Lo-Mob folks!).

Mextures is a texture application used to enhance images with HDR, grunge, grit, and other effects.

Noir is a cool black and white conversion app with a steampunk interface. It is particularly strong with the ability to add user-defined area alterations and vignettes.

Plastic Bullet takes an image and randomly generates a series of cool filter effects, mostly with an interesting glow added.

Retouch also called TouchRetouch can be used to spot, declutter, and remove unwanted objects from your iPhone photos.

SKRWT modifies perspective, skew, rotation, and lens distortion in an iPhone photo.

Slow Shutter controls the iPhone camera shutter speed and allows you to make long exposures for such things as light trails at night.

Snapseed is my go-to app in the iPhone darkroom. See pages 306–309.

Spectre is an app that lets you take handheld long exposures.

TrueHDR makes a bracketed sequence of photos and combines the exposures into a single iPhone image. I use this app slightly differently. I make the different exposures myself, then use TrueHDR to blend them.

Waterlogue is a fantastic app that renders a watercolor-like image from an iPhone capture. I don’t usually make black and white images that are processed using Waterlogue. But the app is so cool that I couldn’t leave it out of this list.

It’s not an iPhone app, but if you want to make quality large prints from your iPhone images, you will need to enlarge and upsample the JPEGS that the iPhone renders. My favorite desktop application to do this is A.I. Gigapixel from Topaz Labs.

Pagoda—Wandering around the parks of Nara, the old imperial capitol of Japan, I came upon Kofuku-ji, a Buddhist pagoda dating from A.D. 669. It was great fun to play with various versions of this image using my iPhone apps with idea of creating a simulated vintage image.

iPhone 5, back camera, 4.1mm at 1/128 of a second at f/2.4 and ISO 50, hand held; converted to black and white using Snapseed.