Amazing apps

The apps to turn your snaps into masterpieces!

Photogene 4

£1.99 Developer Omer Shoor, mobile-pond.com iOS 6 or later; iPhone, iPad or iPod touch This powerful Universal editing app uses sliders to dial in adjustments, greatly simplifying complex controls for tweaking the histogram and controlling individual colour channels. There’s even a Curves control for more advanced users. You can edit image metadata to add your name, captions, copyright data and so on, while direct export options send your shots to social media, Flickr, Dropbox and even an FTP site, optionally watermarking the output.

Snapseed

Free Developer Nik Software, google.co.uk/nikcollection iOS 5.1 or later; iPhone, iPad or iPod touch Snapseed’s filters, effects and adjustments are broken down into groups so you can quickly find what you need. They eschew sliders in favour of dragging directly on the surface of images to set the strength of each adjustment. The first time you use a filter or effect, a handy overlay explains what each part of the screen does, and how you should swipe, pinch or drag it to apply the change. It’s a Universal app, and an unqualified bargain: it’s free.

Photoshop Touch

£2.99 (iPhone), £6.99 (iPad) Developer Adobe, adobe.com iOS 6 or later; iPhone 4S or later (for iPad: iOS 5 or later; iPad 2 or later) There are fewer helping hands here than you’ll find in Photogene or Snapseed, but it’s no less powerful. It includes brushes and layers, so you can create original compositions – not just edit existing photos. There’s a slightly clunky import/export routine for moving images between the app and your Camera Roll, but Creative Cloud subscribers will welcome the ease with which they can share work between this app and the OS X and Windows editions of Photoshop.

Camera+ £1.49 Developer Tap Tap Tap, campl.us iOS 6 or later; iPhone, iPad or iPod touch Camera+ lets you set discrete focus and exposure points within a scene, allowing you to set, say, a subject’s face to be pin sharp while using a darker background as the metering point so you can recover details that might otherwise be lost to the shadows. Manual exposure compensation lets you iron out mistakes in the iPhone’s automatic algorithms, and there’s an optional spirit level too, which shows on screen when you’re holding the camera level.

Camera Awesome Free (IAP) Developer SmugMug, cameraawesome.com iOS 5 or later; iPhone, iPad or iPod touch Camera Awesome makes a great replacement for the iOS Camera app, allowing you to set separate points for exposure and focus, and overlay your image with a spirit level and a choice of four grids to help you compose your shots. Its editing tools include 108 effects, 63 filters and a one-touch boost for colour, detail and contrast, but only nine of the filters are free. You can preview the rest and buy them in batches costing between 69p and £6.99.