Make Quick Edits

You may not look at your smartphone as a great image editing tool, but with a few key apps you can do more than you’d think. Color correction, red-eye reduction, tonal changes, filters, cropping, and more work just fine on your mobile. Tablets will give you a little more space to mess around, but overall you can accomplish any common task on the smartphone of your choice. The app you’ll need will depend on the kind of edits you want to make. These choices offer a range from simple to powerful: Adobe Photoshop Express (Free, Android and iOS) only handles simple edits but doesn’t take much time to figure out. If you take great images and really just need to make a few adjustments here and there, this free app will do the trick. Aviary Photo Editor (Free, Android and iOS) takes a step up from Photoshop Express by offering many common tools as well as fun filters and effects. If you need a free option that does a little more and don’t need to add a bunch of extra filters, clipart, and the like (which costs about $2 per pack), you’ll get a reasonably powerful app for free. iPhoto (iOS, $5) may entice some iOS users who like its desktop counterpart. In fact, even if you don’t, iPhoto for iOS offers a lot of great editing tools that don’t take much effort. Sure, it’ll cost you, but you get quite a few more options with iPhoto than you will with free photo apps. If you want a professional level of control, however, you’ll need something more. Adobe Photoshop Touch ($5-10, Android and iOS), while a minimal version of its desktop counterpart, actually packs a pretty big punch. It gives you an unparalleled level of control once you get past the learning curve. The app can handle real photo work, so pick it up if you want to accomplish a lot. Try the free apps out first. You might find that you don’t need the paid options because most of what you want to accomplish on your mobile doesn’t require a lot of power. You may not. Either way, better to find out before you drop up to $15 on apps you won’t need.