Many of the best photography apps require a premium subscription. But upgrading your smartphone photography doesn’t always mean spending more money. There are still plenty of powerful free photography tools you can use to enhance your photos.
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Google's Snapseed is a powerful photo editing app that offers professional tools for free. The app has a simple interface, divided into 3 sections: Looks, Tools, Export .
Looks provides all the pre-made filters you can add to your photos for quick edits. Tools shows all the editing tools available in Snapseed. Export lets you share your photos online, create a copy, or export your finished edit to a specific location on your device.
Snapseed offers one of the best non-destructive editing features on a mobile app, allowing you to erase, adjust, or temporarily undo layers. It offers a whole suite of tools for creating vintage-style photos, such as double exposure, grain, adding frames, and glamorous lighting effects.
Adobe Lightroom Mobile is a powerful tool for professional photo editing and color correction. Unlike Snapseed, which focuses on intuitive yet deep manual adjustments, Lightroom Mobile offers a more structured workflow specifically for photographers.
It includes essential tools for exposure control, color grading, and detail enhancement, making it a great choice for more precise editing. It also allows for non-destructive editing, allowing you to fine-tune your adjustments without permanently changing the original image. Despite its premium features, the free version still offers a powerful toolkit that’s worth using.
While many will point out that Snapseed is better than Lightroom Mobile for photo editing , keep it because of its presets, filters, lens-specific corrections, and powerful AI-powered auto-enhancement feature.
It's not uncommon for smartphones (especially budget ones) to underutilize their camera hardware. Open Camera lets you access camera settings and features that your default app might not have. It lets you manually adjust settings like ISO, shutter speed, white balance, and exposure compensation.
Open Camera also works well with older phones. It allows you to shoot in RAW even if your phone doesn’t officially support it. It also extends your phone’s night photography capabilities by offering an X-NIGHT feature that uses a long exposure algorithm and post-processing to create sharp nighttime images while still at low ISOs.
Even if you have a new Pixel phone with all of these features, you should still install Open Camera because of its effective noise reduction algorithm and auto-leveling feature. Overall, Open Camera is recommended as a side-by-side app to help supplement any features that might be missing from your smartphone's default camera app.
If Open Camera seems a little outdated or complicated to you, try ProCam X. It’s based on Open Camera but has a slightly tweaked user interface and simpler settings. With ProCam X, you still get all the features like RAW shooting, ISO settings, manual focus, exposure bracketing, and X NIGHT.
ProCam X makes it easier to see what a camera feature does by providing simpler labels, icons, and a UI that exposes features that might be harder to find in Open Camera. Using ProCam X is easier because all photo modes are easily accessible on screen while shooting.
One minor downside to ProCam X is that it only allows for a maximum of 10 megapixels. While Open Camera is still preferable, new photographers and those who want a cleaner, simpler user interface to work with might want to consider ProCam X.
Want to take vintage photos without having to go through the hassle of post-production and finding the right camera settings? Try shooting with Huji Cam to easily create vintage photos with just your smartphone!
This app faithfully recreates the aesthetic of disposable film cameras from the 90s, adding grain, light leaks, and color gradients to simulate the look of vintage photography. When recreating a retro look, shoot directly on Huji Cam as it applies vintage filters instantly without any further editing.
What people like about this setup is that you don't really know what the finished image will look like until the Huji Cam has finished "developing" it, giving you that slight sense of excitement you often feel when developing film.
If you find Huji Cam a bit too basic and are looking for something with more features, try OldRoll. This is another vintage photography app that brings vintage film camera effects to your photos without any additional post-processing. While Huji Cam emulates a disposable Fuji camera from the 90s, OldRoll offers more camera options by offering free access to both the Classic M and Polaroid cameras.
In addition to the camera, OldRoll also gives you the ability to choose between different film types, backgrounds, and frame sizes like mini, wide, or square. If you play around with OldRoll and explore it enough, you’ll eventually find that it actually offers a lot more features, such as multiple lens filters, a collage editor, and even a face retouching feature.
Lens Distortions is an easy-to-use app with a beautiful UI and intuitive UX. The app offers a variety of free, good quality filters that you can further customize to enhance your photos without looking out of place.
Lens Distortions is one of the few apps that offers quality features for free without all the annoying ads or credit systems that the majority of editing apps seem to be using these days.
You don't need to buy premium apps or deal with annoying ads to take great photos with your smartphone . These apps can instantly improve your photos without paying a dime or compromising on quality.
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