With so much of digital marketing relying on visual communication, it’s important for your brand to have good photos, whether it’s product shots for your website or posts on your social media feed.
Smartphones now have come a long way in terms of their camera capabilities, and many photos you take on them hardly need any editing to look pretty good. However, photos that are edited well and consistently can turn your visual marketing from boring to brilliant.
Just as taking the photos is easy with your smartphone’s own camera, so too is editing the shots you get. Here are the five best photo editing apps available for free on your Apple and Android devices, plus some other top tips for getting the best photos possible on a small business budget.
Snapseed (iOS and Android)
This Google-owned app is a great option for beginner and advanced photo editors alike. The intuitive interface offers a wide range of tools. It has all the basic features like cropping and color adjustment, but with its selective masking features, you can apply your adjustments to just specific parts of the photo that need editing. Furthermore, you can edit the depth of field to emphasize your focus.
Like many mobile photo editing apps, Snapseed has preset filters available, but users can also edit the filters, save preferences, and create new filters to use again and again on all of your photos.
VSCO (iOS and Android)
This app offers a camera, community, and editing app all in one, though its editing tools are what it’s best known for, with a wide range of filters available with classic film looks. In addition to the filters, the strength of which can be adjusted, it also has specific photo adjustment options to edit the perspective, color, exposure, etc.
The app is free and comes with plenty of free filters, or you can access all of the options and filters for a monthly subscription, or buy filter packs for a one-time fee.
Adobe apps (iOS and Android)
Adobe offers several free photo editing apps for both iOS and Android devices that complement their desktop software.
Adobe Photoshop Express has all the standard editing tools you’d expect, plus a range of smart filters to correct common issues with your photos.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is better suited for advanced photographers, offering more professional adjustment options. This app and its features are free, but if you are subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud, you gain access to even more advanced features.
Photo Collage (iOS and Android)
Maybe your photos are already edited, but you want to put them together for a social media graphic or add text. This app offers many collage layouts as well as graphics, banners and text options to customize your image.
UNUM (iOS and Android)
When it comes to Instagram, UNUM is one of the most comprehensive image editing and planning apps available. While it does offer editing tools, where it exceeds is in the ability to pre-plan your social posts to achieve a consistent look. You can draft posts, set reminders and even schedule uploads from the app. If your brand is image heavy, ensuring a consistent social media feed can be a key part of this.
Whether you have photoshoots with a professional camera or capture images with your smartphone on the go, using any one of these apps can help transform your pictures into works of art that make your online image pop.