Best apps for summer photos and videos
Get those memories of fun in the sun looking their best
For many of us, summer is the ideal time for taking snaps aplenty. All that extra time outside, with great natural lighting and your kids being on vacation, means you’ll almost certainly end up capturing some special moments using your iPhone’s camera. But what to do with them? Our roundup of seven creative apps will have your photos and videos looking tip-top in next to no time.
If you’re looking to improve the quality of your shots right out of the gate, download Camera+ (From $2.99, separate iPhone and iPad versions). It takes your device’s camera functionality and injects it with steroids, giving you full control (should you want it) overexposure, ISO, and so on. That the timer’s countdown goes up to 30 seconds is handy, too.
Tried but not quite managed to capture the perfect snap? Just open
Afterlight ($0.99, Universal) and you’ve got a host of photo- tweaking tools at the tap of a finger - from hue and saturation through to merging two pictures. Heck, you can even recreate the look of an old-school 35mm camera, if that’s your style.
For an even faster way to turn your images into proverbial works of art, try Prisma (Free, iPhone). The app’s range of painterly filters swiftly and simply transform a standard photo into something unique. You can even choose, broadly, to which areas of the image you want to apply an effect - putting a standard selfie on a mosaic background, perhaps?
Once you’re happy with your photos, you might want to compile them to showcase a special day or trip. Pic Collage (Free with IAPs, Universal) is your friend here, enabling you to easily stitch together pictures in a wide variety of grids, as well as adding effects and making adjustments to each image on an individual basis.
If you’d rather have a more tangible memento, use Photo
Books by Simple Prints (Free, Universal) to create a glossy printed tome. You can choose your own layouts, add captions and send off your work for printing into an 8x8 inch book, all from your iOS device. Prices start at $14.99 plus shipping, and you get a free online version of your volume, too.
Are moving pictures more your thing? Open up Quik (Free, Universal) and you can add snappy effects, drop in titles, and accompany the results with some music. The app also enables you to thread photos together into a slideshow-cum-video, and will automatically create you a weekly highlights reel.
Finally, if you go on vacation and don’t smugly post about it on
Instagram (Free, iPhone) with a jumble of hashtags, did you ever really go on vacation at all? Best not to run the risk of disbelievers.