For those of you who love instagram and similar iphone photo apps, I decided to do some research of my own for all of my fellow android peeps. (after my instagram rant are you really surprised I’m a pro-android babe?) While I still stand by my word [on taking sub-par pictures and turning them into something interesting and then pawning them off as art because you tweaked em being UNCOOL to the extreme], I still recognize that the need is out there for android lovers out there for fun photo apps like that. Oh and I forgot to mention the best part, they are ALL FREE. I simply refuse to pay for apps, call me cheap, but I have a hard time paying money for an app on a 600 dollar phone plus the ridiculous amount we already pay monthly for service, FREE is always better.
Here are my Top 5 Favorite Photo Android Apps I’ve tested myself and some I even use regularly. Some are fun, some are useful. All are awesome.
1. Adobe Photoshop Express I rely pretty heavily on photoshop to edit my pictures (cropping, levels, etc) on my computer, so why not have access to the same powerful application on my phone? Aside from the native photo editing stuff you can do with the android camera/gallery app itself, you can tweak many things like saturation, tints, in addition to quick effects and borders. If you’re looking for something that gets the job done neatly without the fuss this is your app.
2. Little Photo This app is by far the most fun and useful photo tweaking app I have come across and currently my favorite. Once you get used to the menu choices, playing with your camera photos is fun and STUPID easy. If you’re going to use any lomo/bw/contrasty filters, this one is probably your best bet, there are lots of choices and they are all executed very well. My favorite options are Heavy, Outage, BW film (not smooth), and Lomo II & III.
3. Photo Tools Its like having a handheld greycard, lightmeter, gps, weather, level, sunset/magic hour calculator, and timer plus others all in one. Its totally useful and comes in handy in the age when we can’t really afford to carry around a million (expensive) gadgets to get one amazing shot.
4. Photo Grid For the lovers of photo collages, you can pretty much adjust anything, I love it. I don’t tweet collages often, but once in a while the mood strikes.
5. Retro Camera While the app itself is limited to only a few cameras, this one includes some of those “vintage” borders you instagram lovers seem to drool all over, including a pinhole filter that shows the edges of film, which I think might be my favorite, it reminds me of the Blackbird Blackbird Fly toycam I want that allows you to expose the film edges.
Honorable mentions go out to Camera Streak for being a fun way to play with light on your phone, Action snap(pictured below) for being able to take up to 9 consecutive shots and splice them in a fun action packed grid, FxCamera for being the ONLY free decent app with a fisheye filter, and HDR Camera for actually taking 3 metered shots in a row (as opposed to applying a filter) and creating a composite HDR picture straight on your phone.
I hope my mini reviews of the top rated and FREE android photo apps helped all my droid photo babes out there, we are finally gaining on those apple fans. If you have any cool apps you’d like to me to check out, I’d be more than happy to download them and test them out, so let me know!
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