Best photo editors for your iPad
Polish your shots, add filters, and fix tone and color on your touchscreen
Along with photogRaphy, photo editing has become something we do every day. Doing it properly, though, still takes specialist software that‘s quite demanding of computing power and can be complicated to use. Fortunately, the A–series processors in today’s iPads are up to the job, and touch screens help developers make interfaces simpler. That means your choice of image manipulation apps now ranges from freebies that can pep up pictures with a few taps to paid packages with desktop–class professional tools.
For this test, we’ve picked five options that promise more than just one–click filter effects. All of them have versions of the essential tone and color adjustments that you’ll need to get the best out of your pics, along with cropping, straightening and other basics. They can also open raw images, meaning there’s more data to work with and a better chance of pulling the picture you want out of the shot you got. Beyond that, each takes its own approach. Affinity Photo is a full–blown Adobe Photoshop rival, due to be rivalled soon by Adobe Photoshop for iPad (see the Higher option, right). Affinity Photo makes amazing use of the iPad, which is more than we can say for Snapseed, Google’s free tool — but even this has some unique features tucked away behind its pale grey icons. Pixelmator Photo is a dedicated snapper’s edition of the popular all–round image editor, while Darkroom comes from an independent developer who brings a new eye to picture–editing software. Adobe’s Lightroom is part of the top–end subscription–based Creative Cloud ecosystem, but can its base app offer something to the rest of us for free?
Whatever your skills, we’ll help you find out which one suits you best.