Snap happy holidays
Make the most of your summer break photos with these five fantastic apps
THE season of poolside portraits and sunset snaps is upon us, and soon Instagram will be awash with more summer holiday photos than you can shake a selfie stick at.
But you don’t want to bore your followers with images just anyone could take, do you? No, you want to stand out from the crowd, do something special, and show your friends that your holiday is better than their holiday.
You’ve got a cracking camera in your phone, so why not spend that little bit more time planning and polishing the pics you take on the beach this year to make them worthy of someone else’s attention?
Here are five apps to help you make the most of your holiday photos.
PHOTOFOX (iOS, free with in-app purchases) ■ THEY SAY: Unleash your creativity and start transforming photos into artistic masterpieces.
■ WE SAY: Photofox is the follow up to the popular Enlight photo editing app, and it brings a fullfeatured image editor to your iPhone. It can do almost anything a desktop app can do, and is superbly designed and intuitive.
It is somewhat controversial, as it introduces subscription pricing – you can pay £2.29 a month or £17.49 a year to use all the app’s features, or just pay a one-time £38.88 to unlock the full version forever.
That might seem like a lot, but the people who sweat tears over the code to make apps this good are not doing it for free, are they?
Everybody needs to get paid.
TOUCHNOTE (iOS and Android, free with in-app purchases.)
■ THEY SAY: Turn your photos into thoughtful postcards and send them to the people who matter most.
■ WE SAY: Remember when you used to have to get off your sun lounger, pop down the shop, buy a postcard, find a pen, buy a stamp, then find a postbox to send a holiday memory back home?
TouchNote does all that for you without you having to move anything but your finger on the touch screen.
Bonus feature: You’re sending your own images of your actual holiday instead of one taken by a local snapper in 1978.
TOUCHRETOUCH (iOS, £1.99)
■ THEY SAY: TouchRetouch is an app that offers you all the tools you need to efficiently remove unwanted content from your iPhone photos.
■ WE SAY: It’s annoying, isn’t it? There’s the perfect photo of you, gracefully skipping over the shore break and into the shimmering azure ocean, but the whole thing is spoiled by the fat, bald fella who wandered into shot at the last minute, splashing about like a walrus.
Fear not, TouchRetouch will have him gone within seconds, as if he was never even there.
The app is a one-trick pony, but does that one trick very well – you can, within reason, remove unwanted elements from images, leaving you with just the bits you like. Usually you, looking good.
PHOTOPILLS (iOS and Android, £9.99)
■ THEY SAY: Unlock your creative potential! Discover how to easily turn any Sun, Moon and Milky Way scene you imagine into a real picture… and start shooting truly legendary photos every time you pick up the camera!
■ WE SAY: I don’t really know what ‘legendary photos’ are, but PhotoPills is all about timing – helping you to be in the right place at the right time, to get the best shot possible.
You want the Sun to be just dipping behind the corner of those mountains? Or the Moon to just be clipping the bell tower of the city’s cathedral? PhotoPills will tell you where to be, and more importantly when to be there, to be sure to get the image you want.
FILMBORN (iOS, free with in-app purchases)
■ THEY SAY: Hold the past, present, and future of photography in the palm of your hand.
■ WE SAY: Filmborn is next-level photo filters – it accurately reproduces what your digital images would look like had you captured them using some of the most popular film from the golden age of analogue photography.
Not only that, but it’s also a photography tutor that explains how to get the best from each film type.
If you want to hone your snapping skills, and take photos that look and feel like they were captured on film, focus on this app and you’ll be making better, and better looking, photos in no time.