This podcast is all about mobile photography and mobile editing, and other related stuff. I will go over 5 popular and main mobile apps that I personally use for my mobile photography on my Smartphone. I will try to break them down as much as possible for everybody to understand and see which app will suit your style of photography. I will also tell you whether it’s available in Android or IOS, whether it costs money or not and I’m gonna go through the five most popular apps out there just to kind of forewarn you a little bit, most of these apps actually do a lot of the same thing. There is rarely a time when you will get an app that has mind-blowing features that another app might not have but most apps will require you to control the exposure adjustments, do contrast and some effects in there but it’s really about finding an app that you like to use, design, the interface, how easy it is to use and I will keep that in mind.
Table of Contents
So, let’s start with the list and the first app I will look at is a no-brainer for everyone out there especially now that Adobe has released the new Lightroom CC for the desktop application but the Lightroom CC app is basically meant to be an app that floats between platforms. If you are part of the Adobe Creative Cloud photography subscription, you can download the free Lightroom CC version, the desktop app for your computer. you can play around with it and it’s some kind of slim version of Lightroom but it also works very well with the new Lightroom CC app that is available for IOS and Android. Before this app was released, the mobile photography part of Lightroom was kind of difficult to understand. You had the main Lightroom CC which is now called the Classic Creative Cloud (Classic CC), and that was meant to be able to sync with your phone but sometimes it worked while other times it didn’t. At least in a bunch of occasions, I tried to sync some files and they would never sync but now it’s easier to drag your files into Adobe Lightroom CC and it would sync the files across your devices. So, if you drag it into your desktop’s Lightroom CC, you can then go to your iPhone or iPad and it will automatically be there. It syncs the files very well.
If you have the subscription, make sure to download the Lightroom CC app, it is free especially if you have the subscription model and it works great in syncing between your desktop application and all other applications in your other devices altogether. One of the cool things it allows you to do is that if you shoot something with the Lightroom CC app, you will actually be editing a digital raw file of whatever you photographed. So, you won’t be editing a jpeg file that you might have shot with the native camera app and then pulling it in there but instead editing with a raw file. That’s one really cool thing as you’ll have plenty more information to play with and might be able to get a little bit better exposure. Anybody who has that subscription should have this app even if you do not want to sync between your devices, it is a really cool app to have especially just for simple editing.
This is yet another no-brainer app and everybody likely has heard about it. It is a free and amazing app for Android and iOS with tons of features but it is also free. The creators seem to update this app a lot more than any other feature photography apps that I have found, always adding more features, effects, filters and the ability to do different things. Back then when I downloaded the app, it was kind of slim down and I could do some manual exposures, contrast and sharpen details among other things but now you have the ability to do brushes, selective color adjustments, and you have a lot of crazy filters you can do and it’s just a really awesome app. It also has an iPad version if you have an iOS device and this can help you when editing since it gives you a bigger screen to work on. If I was to rank my top 3 best apps, this would definitely make it among them because it is so easy to use.
This is also another popular mobile app and is available for free and is compatible with Android and iOS. It’s a really cool app allowing you to create some kind of subtle adjustments that will mimic film effects. If you are really interested in these kinds of film effects, this is one of the mobile photography apps that you should probably download. The one thing that I’m not really particular about when it comes to this app is the workflow. Much like Snapseed you can apply different effects but I like the way Snapseed lays out the effects such that you kind of apply a group of effects and the click “done” when you are through with them and then get another menu. VSCO seems like you have to go backwards a little bit and if you play with the app you will understand what I am talking about. That’s the only thing I don’t like about this app but would use it if I wanted to get that awesome film looks because it is so easy so easy to create those really subtle film looks. One of the cool things it does have and which I haven’t taken a part of because the workflow doesn’t suit me is that it has a community like Instagram around it. It is kind of a photo-sharing platform that is built in and once you take a photo and maybe you want to share it on your social media account, you can also share it in the VSCO portfolio that is kind of built into your account when you signed up for it. That’s a really cool thing to do but obviously, you are going to get more popularity when you upload it to your regular social media like Instagram, Facebook and so on.
That’s pretty much for the free apps that are available and it’s not a huge list and you’ve probably heard of these apps before but the reasons these are ones that everybody talks about is probably that they are the top rated apps out there. They are the best working apps and give you the best experience and quality of your prints. These are really good apps that I have and I keep popping out and especially the Lightroom CC app which is very awesome and the one I’ll probably continue using more.
One of the paid apps that is kind of expensive depending on whether you are thinking of an android app or iPhone app pricing is called ProCam. It is a $4 US Dollar mobile photography app and is only available for iOS. But if you have an iOS device ProCam app it’s probably one of those go-to apps you’ll do when you want to have more control over the actual taking of the image. You have really nice control over exposure settings and so you can both the exposure settings manually so shutter speed aperture, ISO and all that stuff for stills and video as well. This is the main reason I particularly downloaded the app because I wanted to change the video settings on it. So, you can actually change to video mode and record videos. You can change the frame rates for both stills and videos so you can kind change the ratios for stills but especially for videos and frame rates you can change 24 fps 60, 30 all in the app without the need to go out to the main settings of the iPhone or Android phone. You can do everything in the app and this is what makes it really great. The other thing is that you get a DNG file from and so if you are not shooting jpeg and you can’t shoot jpeg, you are not getting compressed jpegs but instead, you get full DNG that you can then export to Lightroom, open it up in Lightroom CC and play with it there. That is another really great feature of that mobile photography app.
Another one is that if you have an Apple watch per chance, then you do have a compatible app with it. This means you can take a photo with your Apple watch and have it as a remote shutter in a way. That’s a really good selling feature from it but again, its price tag is $4.99 and so, if you’re not used to spending money on small Smartphone apps this might be a little bit pricey for you.
This is also another great photography app for mobile and costs $3.99. It is for iOS and Android. It has tons of creative tools that you will have double exposure effect built into the app, tool shift effect, slight leaks, tons of crone tools that help you remove distracting elements of your phone that you’ll typically have to export that file to some sort of desktop app like Lightroom or Photoshop and remove it that way. For a simple removal of distract
ing objects, there are really cool clone tools that allow you to easily remove stuff. If you just enter that creative photography space and you don’t want your photos to look like just simple edited images, Enlight is one of the best apps you can look into because it allows your photos to look really creative with a lot of tools in there.
Those are the 5 main apps that I wanted to go over but I just want to throw in a quick honorable mention in there which is actually Instagram. You might be thinking, ‘well, of course if you are in photography you do need Instagram as the main way of sharing photos in social media’ but the reason I say Instagram specifically for editing is that a lot of people don’t know that you can actually edit plenty heavily in Instagram with basic adjustments such as contrast, brightness, shadows, tilt-shift, highlight of shadows, sharpening and many other things. One of the recently released versions of Instagram you get a download button in the editing section so that if you want to edit your photo and save that file you are able to do it without even posting it. Previously, if you wanted to have a really cool effect or filter to it you had to edit in Instagram and then post it because it would save the edited version in your phone or you just had to take a screenshot and kind of crop it a little bit. However, Instagram has now given you the opportunity to download the photo without even posting it. So, if you want to do a quick edit and you don’t want to mess with any other apps and you have Instagram on your phone, you can do it and then download the file.
The featured item of the week is from Sleeklens and the reason I am talking about it is that it mainly involves autumn. Autumn is in full swing and we have the cool weather coming in and the leaves coming off the tree. I want to go over a really cool collection which I personally like a lot. This is the Autumn Pumpkin Glaze Overlay and Action Collection. It really is crazy how much value you get out of this collection because you will have 78 actions specifically designed help you edit your fall photos. You also get a lot of overlays including 20 color filter overlays that will help you match a little bit of color tones and bring stuff to your photos so they can look really awesome. You will also get 20 light overlays, 15 sky overlays which include storm clouds, sunset clouds, and regular day sky clouds and stuff like that. It also gives you 10 rain overlays and 8 leaf overlays which are really great if you want to enhance those leaves on your photos. In addition, there are 2 customary brushes so you can paint in leaves yourself and place them exactly where you want them to be. You also get 10 bird overlays to easily add birds flying to your photo so as to enhance the images a little bit. All these are imported to Photoshop and are transparent which allows you to add them easily. This is a really cool thing to have and if you want to enhance your fall photos in Photoshop, make sure to check the Autumn Pumpkin Glaze Overlays and Action Collection from Sleeklens and also with every episode we like offering a coupon code which you can use to get 10% off your purchase. You can use coupon code Sleeklenspodcast to get 10% off anything in your cart.
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