17 Best Photo Editing Apps For iPhone (2022)
There is no dearth of phones in the market today, but iPhone has held its supremacy in such a big fish market of Smartphones the world over. The Apple phone is well known for its technical excellence, and it is for this reason, the iPhone camera is one of the most advanced cameras with dual-lens, bokeh effects, and many more features.
The Appstore, to keep in tune with its high featured iPhone technology, has also come up with excellent backend support. It provides the best photo editing Apps with plenty of free options to give its user the best experience in-tune with the best of technology.
A technically featured photo editing apps list for your iOS devices is provided below for immediate reference to help save your valuable time in searching here and there. So let’s get going.
17 Best Photo Editing Apps For iPhone (2022)
#1. Snapseed
This application, developed by a Google subsidiary, Nik Software, is one of the most powerful photo editing tools for iPhone. An easy to use, all-purpose photos editor, it is very popular amongst professional and amateur photographers alike.
Snapseed is available for free to download from the App Store with no extra in-app purchases to pay for. The app dramatically improves your images and enhances photos through digital filters providing stunning edits.
Snapseed gives you the liberty of more than thirty edit tools and filters to choose from. You can use lens blur for Bokeh, attune your picture’s exposure, augment shadows, regulate or fine-tune the white balance, and much more.
The tool has a whole list of available features wherein using pre-existing filters; you can improve the sharpness of the picture, the exposure, color, and contrast of the image portraying different shades of moods. Using the filters, you can convert your colored photos to black and white to create a timeless antique look.
Its Portrait tool is perfect for creating flawless unblemished smooth skin and glittering eyes. The Healing tool enables removing unwanted objects and is an excellent tool to crop unwanted things from the photograph.
You can even crop or rotate the image or straighten the image through perspective correction. The app also allows the creation of “presets” enabling saving for future reference if you want to share the things you care about with people over Instagram.
This Google photo editing powerhouse with not only innumerable features but also the ease of use of these features and plenty of photo editor tips and tutorials to help you get the most out of the app has made this app for iPhone one of the most favoured choices and undoubtedly one of the best editing apps for one and all.
#2. VSCO
This is another app amongst the top photo-editing apps for iPhone. This is free to download the app with in-app purchases. This app also enables capturing RAW images besides the normal default JPEG images, including the appropriate auto color correction and compressed file size, resulting in an efficiently processed image.
A RAW image is unprocessed, which allows the photographer to adjust settings like exposure, white balance, and saturation after the image has been captured. The white balance enables capturing pictures with more accurate colors.
This app offers both free and paid versions. Suppose you go in for the free version. In that case, you will have to acquire the basic tools to edit the raw image like contrast, brightness, colour balance, sharpness, saturation, texture, crop, skew, and other ten different filters known as VSCO presets to choose from, with control over the intensity of each preset.
If you opt for a $20 per annum VSCO X subscription in addition to the above free features, you will be able to garner more advanced photo editing tools, like split tone and HSL. In addition to this, you will have access to over 200 more presets to choose from.
You also gain access to app edit videos, create short GIFs, and the Montage feature to piece together content to create video collages. It will be a bountiful cache of tools at a very nominal annual cost as a photography buff.
We observe that this VSCO app might look to be a very confusing tool at first glance, but once you get the hang of the basics, the photo editor app can glitz up your photos as no other app can. This app also enables you to save your images in your VSCO gallery for future use. You can even share the images directly from the app in your VSCO circle and even over Instagram or in any other way with anyone you feel like.
#3. Adobe Lightroom CC
This full-fledged photo-editing app for iPhone is free to download from the App Store with a simple to use but powerful user interface. The basic tools with the default one-tap filter preset enable quick editing by easy and fast improvements in the photographs in fine-tuning the color, sharpness, exposure, contrast, and any other details that come in handy for beginners.
Advanced users can pay for the premium version by downloading it from the App Store. You can shoot using the DNG RAW format and through in-app purchases at a subscription of $4.99 unlock advanced photo editing tools.
These editing tools help make selective adjustments in Curves, Color Mix, Split Tone, artificial intelligence-based auto-tag feature, perspective correction, and Chromatic Aberration adobe tool to repair chromatic aberrations automatically getting a better editing control. The premium version also syncs your edits between iPhone, iPad, computer, and the web via Adobe Creative Cloud.
So the Adobe Lightroom CC, the powerful editing tool from Adobe Suite, is an excellent photo editing app for iPhone and other iOS devices. With some default presets and some of the most advanced photo editing tools, the app is a good app that enables both beginners and professionals to quench their quest for photo editing.
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#4. Lens Distortion
This app, with a basic collection of tools, is available free to download from the App Store. Those looking a step forward to fancy weather and light effects in their photos can make in-app purchases for additional effects. Like many other apps, it is just not a simple editing app with tools such as crop, contrast, etc.
Using this app, you can create a feeling of high-quality, timeless antique photography. You can create rain, snow, fog, or shimmering sunlight atmosphere, lens flares, and bokeh effect, giving a dramatic feel to the environment in which you photograph yourself. Bokeh is a Japanese word, and the Bokeh effect is the overall quality of the blur or an out-of-focus area in a photograph.
This app enables high-quality image blending or overlay. This blending can be done by first uploading the image you want to have in the background. Thereafter, press the overlay button from the toolbar in your iPhone, and you will find a new upload box that will be displayed. Next, you choose the image you want to overlay with and press upload. This will enable one image to blend onto the other, creating a special effect.
The suffuse effects can be varied by adding shimmer, sparkle effects, or blurring the image by adjusting the opacity, brightness, contrast, and color of different overlays by slight sliders’ slight adjustments. Different effects can be masked one over the other, blending in or standing out in such a way, giving a unique look to your image.
The app, as stated earlier is free to download with a basic collection of standard tools and overlays, but in order to acquire more effects, you must purchase the premium filters through in-app purchases or sign up for the premium subscription. You can also outrightly buy the premium filters through a one-time payment and keep them to yourself forever, for anytime usage. It is this ability to combine and blend or overlay several effects that make this app one of the best photo editing apps.
#5. Afterlight
This is an all-in-one, all-purpose photo editing app with a variety of different tools starting from the basic ones like contrast, brightness, color balance, sharpness, saturation, texture, crop, skew, and going to the latest and most creative ones.
The app is available to download for free from the App Store, but if you go in for a monthly subscription of $ 2.99 or annual membership at just $17.99, you can take advantage of its facility of an entire library of 130 unique filters, 20 dusty film overlays, and touch tool adjustments with simple on-screen gestures to alter a part of the photo, RAW image support and a lot more.
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You can start editing with advanced tools and plenty of presets to choose from like curves, grain, overlays, selective colors, and many more. These tools enable you to play with a mix of colors and tones and fine-tune your images to the very best you can. The app provides a free set of basic filters, but you can even unleash many more as per your choice and creative needs.
The app offers a fun way to add graphics through the use of customizable text and artwork to enhance your images. The double exposure tool helps image overlays and blends to provide a classic touch and create a unique combination of images. With such a big and impressive bouquet of photo editors, this app is desired both by amateur and professional photographers.
#6. Darkroom
This tool enables you to organize your iPhone photos by editing images of any kind like Raw photos, Live Photos, Portrait mode, and many more you can think of. This app can access your complete photo library with a bunch of neatly arranged tools and filters. It is available to download free of cost from the App Store, and for the use of enhanced features, you can be subscribed to the app.
This app for iPhones has even simplified editing photos for a normal user by creating Siri shortcuts, editing live photographs, and syncing your complete library of snaps to the internet. With a backup of 120 megapixels of RAW and large images, you can easily edit all kinds of pictures on your iPhone.
There is a gallery of built-in filters, and if these do not suffice your needs, you can also create your custom filters right from scratch. Darkroom can also help you choose frames based on the colors in your photograph if you think you are getting confused and unable to decide through its batch processing feature, by editing many photos in a single batch, in one shot.
To enable more premium features like color tools, watermarking of images, curve tools, and use of custom icons, you can pay or avail of the monthly or annual subscription at the rate of $3.99 or $13.99, respectively. You can avail of a one-time payment plan, too, making a one-time lifetime fee of $49.99. The choices are plenty, but the option is purely yours depending upon your needs and wants.
#7. Enlight Photofox
It is more than just a photo editing app but an image editing tool with a professional and artistic touch. It is smart, free to download an app that can transform your images from a stock photo to a work of art.
It enables you with an option of blending or overlay of several images, superimposing one over the other, creating a collage of special effects to aggrandize a photograph. This photo editing app for iOS users also offers extremely active filters and masking techniques for quickly editing images.
It enjoys a RAW image editing feature with a 16-bit image depth support that allows the photographer to make high-quality tonal adjustments, including exposure, white balance, and saturation after the image has been captured.
With its QuickArt or ReadyMade sections, a simple-looking photograph can be transformed into a masterpiece in such a way that the final result will look absolutely nothing like the original photograph at the end of the day.
For more advanced editing features like adjustment in blending modes, change perspective, transparency, and blending of images, etc. .you will need to subscribe to the app, purchasing the pro version of the app from the App Store.
The developers of the app have also provided for tutorials showcasing their concepts for those users who want to learn, understand, and make use of its applications without any difficulty. This has also helped in the popularity and improved market demand of the app.
#8. Prisma Photo Editor
Photo editing is a work of art, and an artist would like his work to become a masterpiece in itself. This is where the Prisma photo editor comes into play, helping the editor to refashion the photograph giving it a total makeover. It is undoubtedly, amongst the best iPhone App for Artistic Photo Editing.
The app sends the images you want to remodel to the server. The server begins to convert the pictures using the app’s filter presets. The strength of these filter presets is adjustable, and they enable them to produce a combination of impressive computer-generated wonderful artworks.
The edited images obtained can be compared with the originals with a simple tap on the iPhone screen. Each resultant image will be unique in itself with no resemblance to the other. These edited contents can be shared within your Prisma group or the open friend’s circle without any glitches.
The majority of the preset filters are free to use. Still, if you want more functionalities, advanced filters, unlimited HD styles, an ads-free experience, etc. you will have to subscribe to the premium version of the app, which comes at a cost. With additional advanced features, this premium version is worth the penny spent and in no way pinches the pocket. Overall, it is a good app to have in your quiver.
#9. Adobe photo Express
It is free imaging and collage making application from Adobe Systems Pvt. Ltd but is not considered to be on par with the original version of the photo editing software. It nevertheless performs a variety of functions standing to its name and meeting professional standards.
It can implement iPhone editing functions like contrast adjustment and exposure, remove blemishes like red eyes or nose, correct perspectives, and straighten crooked images and distorted camera angles. It can also crop, add texts, stickers, and borders to your images.
The Adobe Photo Express can, in a single tap retouch, assemble collages and combine photos on iPhone to create something new and distinctive. It also includes unique lenses cum filters and adds dynamic effects like portrait, black and white, color adjustment to enhance the photos’ magic.
The app is available to download for free from the App Store with no in-app purchases. However, If you want to make use of all its features and complete facilities, you will have to go in for a paid subscription at the rate of $9.99 per month.
The app is very helpful with in-app tutorials, and beginners can learn with ease by watching playbacks of others and apply the same edits to their pictures, improving their working skills. One can create fun memes and post directly to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, WhatsApp, Facebook, and email.
Professionals can choose from hundreds of themes, effects, and other distinct features and use the app as a platform to express their creativity. In a nutshell, the Adobe Photo Express is the one-stop photo editor app used by millions of creative aspirants as proud Photoshop family members.
#10. Touch Retouch
This is an app developed for you by ADVA Soft that offers all the tools needed to promptly, efficiently, and conveniently remove unwanted glitches and objects, eliminating all kinds of distractions from the photograph. Amongst the easiest and most effective apps to use, it is available at the cost of $ 1.99 on the App Store.
The app is the best cut paste app for photos. It enables the cutting of one image from a photograph and pasting it on another image in another photograph. With just the use of your finger, you can remove the unwanted image or content from your photo, making photo editing a child’s play.
You can, with the aid of the one-touch fixes feature in this app, enable photo touch up with the help of a touch eraser or the Blemish Remover tool you can touch any minor blemish once to remove it forever and smoothen out wrinkles remove all pimples, scars or any other blemishes from your selfies looking no less than any famous model, ready for the kill.
Using a segment remover, you can erase only a part of a line or any unwanted electricity and telephone cables from your image. Objects like stop lights, street signs, trash cans, and whatever you feel are spoiling your photo can also be removed. You have to use your finger to highlight the object you want to remove; the app automatically replaces that object with pixels from the surrounding area.
By using the Clone Stamp Tool, you can remove defects or duplicate objects. This app can also remove photobombers from the photograph, which can be described as someone or something intentionally or unintentionally taking the focus and attention of the subject in the picture.
Besides the many removal functions, this app also enables you to add an animation effect, new text, and to do image in-painting also. The app also enables magic effects through the photo lab Wizard that allows you to add filters and effects to photos enabling you to select from a variety of 36 filters and more than 30 frames and can configure everyone, combining them to get amazing and unique effects.
The developers have also provided easy-to-follow tutorials through their in-app video tutorials to offer you some tips and advice and guide you on how to use the app to your best benefit. In case you have any issues in using the app, you can also get in touch with the developers at touchretouch@adva-soft.com.
#11. Instagram
Instagram is primarily a free-to-use photo and video-sharing social networking site created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and was launched on the internet in Oct. 2010. The site is available to download and use for social interaction on the Apple iOS phone over the internet.
So, you might be guessing as to what Instagram has got to do with photo editing. Through Instagram, you can not only share your photos and videos with your friends and acquaintances, but before you share these photos, you would like to make sure that all your photos look good for sharing in your group, this is where it comes in handy as an editing tool.
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Though it does not possess the same range of editing tools as many other editing apps, it is a handy editing instrument with a variety of tools to crop, rotate, straighten, enable perspective correction and provide a tilt-shift effect to your snap.
In addition to the above, it can help adjust the color, exposure, and sharpness of your photograph with a range of colours and black and white filters. Furthermore, the app enables you to apply an Instagram filter to your shoot even if you intend to edit your photo using another app.
With such a wide range of applications, the app has created a niche for itself in the photo editing world of iPhones with the additional advantage of being available for free from the App Store. It is undoubtedly a good photo editing app to have for self-use.
#12. Mextures
Mextures is a fantastic photo editing app with a wide range of effects using a set of standard editing tools. The app is available for download with various tools through in-app purchases at a nominal initial cost of $ 1.99 from the App Store.
As a greenhorn, you can begin with fine-tuning your images using a wide range of preset formulas. It all depends on the user’s skills as to how he uses the features to the best of his ability to maximize profits.
You can apply textures to your iPhone photographs through a combination of different effects like grit, grains, grunge, and light leaks. The stack and blending effects can be used through the creative and beautiful editing of your snaps, adding different moods and visual interests to your photographs.
There are other Mexture users with whom you can share your editing methods and import and save their methods to create unique edits giving a different look to your photographs. It is worth the nominal cost you pay for downloading it, and the balance work is through in-app purchases, and that can be limited to your usage.
#13. Photo Editor by Aviary
This instant photo editing app has been featured in abundance and gives you the huge benefit to choose from multiple attributes it has in store for quality crazy and spotlight lovers. With so many traits, it is one of the best free photo editing apps.
It provides its users access to over 1500 free effects, frames, blenders, and overlays, and a variety of stickers so that your edited photographs bring out your passion for the best, using the best of combinations. The basic editing features, such as crop, contrast, brightness, warmth, saturation, highlights, etc., are the standard ingredients of the app.
It gives you the flexibility of text addition, depending on whether you want to add it to the top or bottom of your photography, giving the feel of a meme. The instant photo editing app, with its single tap enhancement possibility, saves a lot of your time as it can perform actions instantly.
In case you are interested in more improvisations in your image, you can sign in with your Adobe ID to have access to more filters and other enriching ingredients to beautify your picture. The basic editing features, such as crop, contrast, brightness, warmth, saturation, highlights, etc., are the app’s standard ingredients.
#14. Pixelmator
Pixelmator is one of the best photo editing apps for iOS and easily functions on your iPhone and iPad. Being a full-featured image editor enables everything you need to create, edit, and enhance images. Its user interface is touch-sensitive and does not require a cursor. You can perform any function with a feather touch of your finger.
With its predefined color adjustment setups, it enhances image colors. With powerful tools like Levels, Curves, and many more, it can further fine-tune the color tone and make adjustments improving the images giving them an out-of-the-world feel.
The tool also enables you to get rid of unwanted objects from the photograph and even enables your image’s cloning. The blurring effect can give a different dimension to the photo’s background giving it a hazy effect. The tool can sharpen or descale your image, and much more.
With so many breathtaking effects, it can add a different dimension to the picture. If you have a penchant for painting, it brings out the inner creativity in you, enabling a touch of the brush here and there for more improvisations. The best part of this app is to download this feature-filled app from the App Store at a meager sum of $1.99 with no in-app purchases.
#15. HyperSkeptiv
It is a Phantom force LP copyright app with 225.1 MB software compatible with your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. It can be downloaded at $1.99 with no in-app purchases. However, with in-app purchases, you can use them at a fixed monthly premium or a half-yearly premium and is available at an annual premium.
If you love creating different and unusual photos, then Hyperspektiv is a great app to have with you. It is an easy-to-use app. With its various filters using this great app, you can edit and create a completely unrecognizable version of yourself.
With its finger touch feature, you can create mind-blowing hallucinatory images with a single swipe of your finger. It is less of a photo editor, and I would call it more of a photo distorter app to distort your images beyond recognition.
It also uses AR filters, i.e., Augmented Reality filters. Computer-generated effects are prepared to impose or overlap on real-life images, i.e., adding an image in the foreground over your image.
HyperSkeptiv is your partner in creativity, the unique photo manipulation app, and a total 100% departure from a photo editor app. Since you do not have a photo manipulator app, it should purely fall into the photo distorter or manipulator category.
All said and done, and you can stretch your imagination to the highest possible level using this app.
#16. Polarr Photo Editor
This app by Polarr Inc. has 48.5 MB of software compatible with iOS devices, i.e., iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. It is multi-lingual in English, Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, etc. the app also has its desktop version and a mobile version.
The Polarr photo editor is free to download with monthly in-app purchases at $ 3.99 and a yearly in-app purchase option at a rate of $ 19.99. It has a wide variety of tools for use by every photography enthusiast and over 10 overlay modes whereby you can overlay photos and also add multiple effects like clouds, light leaks, and many more.
The app makes use of the concept of Artificial Intelligence and faces detection tools editing an image very easily. The face selected will be fine-tuned in terms of its skin tone, removal of, and improve other facial features like shape up against each part of your face, i.e., the teeth, nose, mouth, etc. independently. It can isolate the blue sky background to make it easier to edit the face of its parts.
Using AI, you get the flexibility to edit images in parts and offers multiple effects, and selectively work on individual areas of a photograph like adding effects in part sections to objects like the sky, the backdrop greenery, luminance, building, or animals. It can also retouch skin make adjustments in the skin toning, color, etc.
So we see that the app has expertise in offering multiple effects and selectively works on individual areas of a photograph, segmenting your photo using AI to make complex edits seem simple, which is its USP.
#17. Canva
It is an online image editor for use on the iPhone and is more than Just a Photo Editing App. This app is simple to use, confusion-free user interface and has no complicated tools. There can be no simpler tool than this as you have to drag your photo into the editor to enable the app to begin its work.
It has a wide range of customizable filters enabling you to change the brightness, contrast, and improve the color saturation, i.e., the intensity and purity of the color. The higher the color saturation, the more vivid is the picture, and the lesser the color saturation, it is closer to the grayscale. These filters can change the mood of your snap.
Because of the app’s drag and control feature, you can, in a matter of seconds, crop and resize your photo. With a few clicks, you can change the pixels as per need. With a huge range of customized templates, it enables poster designing, makes company logos, invitations, photo collages, Facebook posts, and Whatsapp/Instagram stories. In case you want, you can make your template too.
You can share your edited images on Instagram, Whatsapp, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook. The best part is there are no in-app purchases or plugins, and you can edit your images for free.
There are a lot more photo editing apps available for iPhones like UNUM, Filterstorm Neue, etc., and the list is exhaustive. So, I have tried to provide some of the best photo editing apps for iPhone with functions in abundance.
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You can use the one which best suits you as per your needs and wants. It is always suggested to shoot RAW photographs as they capture finer details as compared to a JPEG image. iPhone photos with these apps could look better than the images made on a professional DSLR; that is the beauty of these apps.
