Creativity

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and in the fingers of the iOS device holder

Procreate Pocket $2.99 Platform iPhone

Procreate for iPad’s ethos of an interface that gets out of your way is even more successful in this iPhone version. The top toolbar gives fast access to brushes, smudging, an eraser, layers, and adjustment tools, while at the sides are handles for changing brush size and opacity. Great for actual artists, yet friendly for dabbling in digital painting, you can even record your process as a video.

Enlight $3.99 Platform iPhone, Pad

As well as photoediting basics, this app’s painterly and classic film filters look the part. It can process 50MP images on iPad Pro, reduce noise, freeze areas during edits, and precisely mask any effect. You can’t later adjust effects, only undo, but that’s our only niggle.

Over Free Platform iPhone, iPad

Put text over pics using an app that’s fun to work with, but also powerful. You can overlay multiple layers of text, art, and images, and edit things at any point. The focused and classy effects are perfect for adding beautiful type with a subtle drop shadow for a birthday card, as a watermark, or for Lock screen wallpaper.

Brush Stroke $3.99 Platform iPhone, iPad

Brushstroke turns your real life stills into gorgeous watercolor paintings. Pick an image, tap the Go button, and after a few seconds you get a freshly painted image you can further customize with different brush styles, colored paints and textured canvases. You can also tweak settings such as saturation and brightness.

Comic Life 3 $4.99 Platform iPhone, iPad

Go the whole hog with comic creation: pick from predefined templates or basic page layouts, import images, then get down to work with plenty of control over sound effects and speech balloons, plus a script editor. The app’s filters aren’t brilliant at getting a hand-drawn look, but this is still a great way to craft stories, and you can export to various formats to share with friends – or Stan Lee.

Prisma Free Platform iPhone

Many apps try to turn photos into art, but none hit the spot quite like Prisma. It’s almost disarmingly simple to use: shoot or select a photo, crop it, and then pick an art style; options range from classic paintings to comic book doodles. Your photo is transformed into a mini Picasso or Munch in seconds, and the slide of a finger adjusts the effect intensity. We’ve found the app rarely comes up with a duff result. Our only criticism is its low-res (2.2MP) output.