Come circa 2016 and it’ll be really difficult to ignore social media and your image on it – literally. With Instagram and Snapchat taking over our lives, it is just good sense to download a number of apps that some geniuses have come up with.
Be it a #selfiestar or those obsessed with #cloudporn, here is a list of apps you should have on your phone!
For Those Perfect Selfies
As a blogger I know how difficult it can be to get a perfect selfie: the light is always not ideal – and by the time you’ve figured out the right profile, you’ve taken 10 pictures. Which are you happy with? NONE.
Beauty Plus is an app specifically for beautifying your selfies. You can choose one of the 12 filters (natural is the best) and re-touch your skin, get rid of any dark spots or circles, enlarge your eyes, elongate your neck and (even!) even out your muffin top. I’d say this is ideal for anybody who uses Instagram very often.
You can also try Facetune, for retouching your images – but be prepared: it requires a wee bit more time and patience. I think they also believe in subtlety – which is a good thing, so all the changes you make – retouching your eyes, teeth or lips are going to look natural.
For All Things Landscape
Then, there are some who can make raindrops on your window or Roman windows look like the most beautiful thing you’ve seen in the day.
Try the VSCO Cam. With similar properties of Adobe Lightroom, VSCO is a dream come true for those who love to play with colours, textures and filters. With a diverse variety of filters, shadow tints, fades and highlights, most users agree it adds a lot of depth to your pictures.
Another app to try is Snapseed if you haven’t already – it’s also one of the most downloaded photo apps of all time. With the basics of photo processing (like exposure, shadow and highlight edits), it’s also good for textures and filters. Lens Blur and Tonal Contrast are really popular.
For Product Shots and Compositions
Whether you need to crop, blur or re-focus an image – these apps have a solution for most of your problems.
Touch Retouch: Let’s say you took a picture of a breakfast buffet and you don’t really want that bottle of water to photobomb this otherwise perfect frame. You just mark out the bits that you don’t want and tap the button. (That said, I wouldn’t recommend using this extensively on portraits to avoid messing with the image dimensions.)
Another useful app is After Focus. If you have a friend capturing a beautiful moment and they forget to focus, I think this app can help better it. What it does is mark your foreground and background for you to decide the part or person you’d want to highlight.
This is essentially to help keep people’s attention directed at what you intended to in your photo.
For Collages, Frames and Stickers
A lot of us spend weekends catching up with friends and family and would love to just put it all together – in one frame. For a working professional in media or new media, you have to add text, captions, quotes all the time!
Enter Fotor. One of the easiest applications to work with, Fotor helps with editing pictures, making collages and adding text. If you want to go PRO, then I suggest you also use it for your Facebook cover, your Pinterest stories.
You can also try PicMonkey. It has similar features and is one of the most used tools by bloggers worldwide. You can add borders, text, overlay images and lots more.
(Manavi Siddhanti is a Delhi based blogger and spends a lot of time on social media. You can find her on Twitter @manavisiddhanti.)
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