Five seriously cool photography apps you should have on your phone

There are so many iPhone and Android photo apps nowadays that it’s hard to decide which ones to download. So which ones are the must-have apps that you should you get? 

Your smartphones built-in camera app is great, but there’s a bunch of third-party apps which can help you nail that perfect shot, or to make that stunning edit to your photos. 

Here’s a hand-curated list by the Black Eye team of 5 different photography apps we’ve found helpful in creating great photos. 

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC

Available for IOS and Android for free

The Lightroom app is a powerful photography tool finally brought to your smartphone. This popular desktop software gives you pro level editing tools and a camera app on the go. 

This app is more for the advanced photographers, but it’s made simple with sliders that allow you to adjust the light, contrast, color, distortion, and many other details and effects. 

You can also make and use your own presets, or get some from your favourite photographer and easily add them on your photos. 

It allows you to sync your photos from the desktop app.

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom app also has a camera app, allowing you to choose from Automatic, Professional and High Dynamic Range (HDR) modes. 

The Professional mode allows you to take photos in DNG (RAW), which means that you have more information in the file, allowing you to have more freedom in editing your photos without losing quality. 

Snapseed

Available on IOS and Android for free

The Snapseed app by Google is a legendary app for mobile photographers wanting a great, free software to edit their photos on the go. 

This app is more user friendly than the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC, and our recommendation would be to start with this one. It offers everything you need from the basics to fine tuning your photos, add different filters and many other creative tools like a double exposure tool. You can also add text and frames to your photos. 

Snapseed has an easy to use healing tool, allowing you to quickly get rid of any unwanted objects in your photos. There’s also a “Selective Adjust” tool which lets you select a specific area of your photo and adjust the saturation, contrast, and brightness of that single point. This has been very useful when you want to fine tune your photo.

You’ll also be able to go back to your edits any time, because the app saves your edit history. 

If you want one app, which is powerful and easy to use, go for Snapseed. 

PhotoPills

Available for IOS and Android for $9.99

This app is completely different than the ones listed above. The PhotoPills is a great tool for landscape and nature photographers. It’s more for the hardcore photographers who really want to do real planning beforehand to get the perfect shot, no matter where they go or where they are. 

It’s not free, but for the price of $9.99 you get a big bunch of pro level features, which will really help you to get those mind-blowing photos, all around the world. 

The PhotoPills app allows you to find out when and where the sun will set at a particular location, when the moon will rise and where the Milky Way will be visible. This is very useful information for any landscape photographer wanting to take their work to a new level. 

You’ll be able to plan way ahead of time, and check where the sun sets or rises or what part of the milky way you’ll be able to see in the future. You can even check what time the sweet golden light will hit a specific location, like a church. This might be very helpful information for you to plan when is the best time for you to go on that photography trip and come back with the photos you wanted. 

Slow Shutter Cam

Available only for IOS for $1.99

The Slow Shutter Cam is for photographers who want to experiment with something new and make some more artistic photographs. As the name of the app says, it will allow you to slow your shutter on your phone, which allows you to take long exposure photographs. 

With this app, you can now try to take light trails off cars driving by on a dark street, capture fireworks, take silky smooth photographs of waterfalls, rivers or capture that beautiful seascape with smooth water. 

You can also experiment taking cool light trails while holding a bright light in the dark and moving it, creating different types of shapes and signs or letters. It also allows you to take low light photos, like photos of the milky way or the northern lights. 

For any type of photos taken with a slow shutter, it’s very important to have a tripod, which will help you stabilise the photo and get rid of any camera shake, which would ruin your photograph. 

VSCO

Available for iOS and Android for free

The VSCO app is also a legend in the mobile photography worlds must have apps, and for a good reason. It’s an all-in-on photography app, which works as a camera and editing app. This app mostly known by their beautiful filters. There’s a fair amount of free filters for you to use, but also a never ending supply of new custom filters for sale. And the filter packs are not expensive, which is good or then you can get everything for a yearly subscription $19.99. 

It’s also a social app where you can post your own photographs and follow other interesting accounts. A fun thing is that they don’t use likes or comments, which is a nice change to have from Instagram. 

VSCO also writes articles and interviews from different artists from their community, so there’s something for you to read and learn too. Maybe even get featured. They have also weekly photo challenges!