ios software

Powerful image editing for iOS

Make digital photos look better, and scan in old printed ones

£2.99 FROM Xiaodong Wang, maxcurve.net Made for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

This is a tempting alternative to the complexity of Photoshop.

Curves give you the ability to alter brightness and saturation in an image’s range of tones and brightness. Normally the preserve of high-end apps like Lightroom Mobile or Photoshop on the desktop, MaxCurve gives you the ability to edit images using curves for a mere three quid.

It packs some surprisingly big punches. You can connect to Remote Connections in Photoshop and open raw files on iOS over a network. The tools on offer are gratifyingly high-end – you won’t find Instagram-style filters here, just the ability to change an image’s tone curves to alter its tone, saturation and hue, among other things.

MaxCurve provides you with complete and precise control over how your image looks – to a far greater degree than most apps. You can also create presets once you’ve found a look that works. Images can be exported to your device’s Camera Roll, to Photoshop, or sent straight to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Built-in tutorials would be appreciated: if you don’t know what a luminosity curve is, MaxCurve doesn’t enlighten you.

MaxCurve is capable of producing the kind of refined results that you'd expect from Photoshop. As such, its low price makes it a real steal.

Tone curves are useful for pulling detail out of images that have dark shadows.