Color Story
Bring out the color in your photos
Free (IAPs) From Color Story LLC, acolorstory.com Made for iPhone, iPad Needs iOS 8.0 or later
Color Story is a popular photography app that focuses on color effects and filters. It’s a crowded market, but Color Story is at least free to download, with in–app purchases that are entirely optional. Even so, its interface is clean and the free tools it does include will satisfy most casual users of interest.
The app starts by allowing you to import photos or videos (up to 60 seconds), and version 2.0 introduced a Batch option that allows you to apply effects to multiple files all at once. And, for Instagram addicts, there’s a new Grid option that lets you line up a series of photos and schedule notifications to remind you when they need uploading.
The editing window provides four sets of tools — adjustments, filters, effects, and colors, and a set of cropping and rotation tools. The free filters and effects are fairly limited — they’re really just there to tempt you towards the in–app purchases — with basics such as ‘color pop’ and lens–flares. However, the color adjustment tools are quite versatile, allowing you to adjust color curves, shadows, tints, and hue. Then there’s a new Selective Edit feature that allows you to adjust specific areas of a photo, rather than the entire photo all at once. The emphasis on in–app purchases might be highly irritating at times, but the versatile free tools provided by Color Story should help to keep it at the top of the App Store rankings for quite a while.
the bottom line. The free filters are limited, but Color Story’s color controls are very useful.