Favorite Photography iPhone Apps

edited with Obaby

About 6 months before August was born, Brandon and I bought each other iPhones. While the iPhone camera does not compare in any way to my DSLR, the quality is pretty close to a point-and-shoot camera. Because I keep my phone on hand throughout the day, I have been able to capture some beautiful moments of August's first 13 months of life. To give you an idea of our love of our iPhone cameras, the pictures on the front and back cover of our 2013 family photo album were both iPhone pictures. Capturing our days with our iPhones has been fun, entertaining and life-giving.

Brandon and I have a very different aesthetic with our photos. He prefers heavily filtered, vignetted and blurred iPhone pictures- the kind you get using Hipstamatic. I prefer all of my photos to look as close to real life as possible. I edit most of my pictures but if I use a filter, it tends towards mellow tones. We both enjoy adding text and doodles though. I thought it would be fun to share a few of my favorite iPhone apps for photography. Maybe I will get Brandon to do a guest post with his favorites. If you would like to compare our styles, check out our IG accounts: Claire & Brandon.

Taking the Picture

taken with Timercam

If you have an iPhone, please take all of your pictures using the stock Camera app. The quality of your pictures is drastically improved from using a camera in another app. The only exception is if you want to take a timed picture. I use the free Timercam app for this because I can set the camera front- or back-facing and choose the time delay increment to an appropriate time. Do yourself a favor and promise me you will never take another in-app photo outside of the Camera or Timercam apps. Thanks.



Editing the Picture

edited with VSCOcam (F2 and exposure)
and A Beautiful Mess (border)

If a picture needs editing, I nearly always use VSCOcam app. It is a free editing app that offers various pre-made filters as well as controls for subtle editing of exposure, temperature, saturation, etc. My favorite filters are F2 and LV2 though I will normally decrease the saturation a good bit to mellow them out. This is the best free photo editing app I have encountered.



Personalizing the Picture

edited with A Beautiful Mess

When I want to add text or a border or a doodle to a picture, I use one of three apps (depending on what I am going for). Over is an app that includes artwork as well as various font styles for adding text to an image. It appears to be $1.99 in the app store although it was free a few months ago when I started using it. A Beautiful Mess app is $0.99 right now. They have a few fun filters, borders that appear hand-drawn, fresh doodles and phrases. I love the handmade look ABM app adds to a picture. (I also use this app to create a white border around a taller picture for posting to IG since IG began forcing the square photo dimension. Sometimes a square just doesn't capture it! If you are on IG, you know what I mean.) The other app I have recently started using is made by the same developers as Over. It is called Obaby and is definitely aimed to parents. The app includes artwork for pregnancy, adoption, first and second year and other occasional pieces. I cannot figure out how to delete artwork once it is added which is super frustrating! The great news is this app is normally $4.99 but is FREE for Mother's Day! Go snag it now and start playing around!

edited with A Beautiful Mess (white border)
and Over (text)

It is worth noting that most of these apps have in-app purchases to expand the options available. I do not like spending money on apps so I rarely purchase in-app purchases- but the options really are limitless with what you can do. Also, most apps save your images at a lower resolution so keep that in mind too.

What are some of your favorite apps? Please share!