Best iPhone Photo Editing Apps

Even if your brand photoshoot went off without a hitch, post-production photo-editing should still be an important part of your process. Why? While text captions are necessary, too, visual representation of your brand helps a potential customer imagine themselves using your product or service. You know the quote, Seeing is believing? Well, evocative, accurate imagery is a crucial part of marketing. That’s why we see ads everywhere from television and taxi cabs to blogs and billboards (but that’s not to say radio isn’t an incredibly effective—and cost-saving—means of advertising). The more a potential customer can identify with and remember your brand (via different methods of communication, layers of context, repetition, or reviews), the more likely that lead will turn into a sale.

So back to the visual part of it all—the photos. Whether they’re on your brand’s website, email newsletters, social media, mail flyers, or e-commerce sites, high-quality images have a huge impact on brand awareness, trust, and sales. Post-production editing (also called retouching) elevates your brand photography. Here’s why:

• You can remove or edit the background for clean e-commerce shots.

• You can edit composition (lighting, shadows, saturation, brightness, etc.) for a cohesive brand aesthetic.

• You can retouch minor distractions like blemishes or stray hairs (but if your business sells skin or hair care, you don’t want retouching to exaggerate what the product can actually provide for customers).

• You can straighten the image or adjust the perspective.

• You can crop photos to fit specs for social media and shopping sites.

• You can color correct so that the color of the photographed product matches the color of the product in real life.

Now that we’ve convinced you of the importance of editing, here are our 5 favorite photo-editing apps you can use directly on your phone.

1. Adobe Lightroom

This is a professional app for improving image quality. While a free mobile version is available, the paid-for version (connected to the $119.88 desktop app where subscribers pay just $5 per month for full access) is even better. Lightroom mobile has a built-in camera and you can sync your editing presets for brand consistency. Plus, everything is automatically stored across your Adobe cloud so you can go back and forth between devices without fear of content getting lost.

1. Adobe Photoshop Express

This Adobe app also saves your work across all your Adobe software. It’s great for basic retouching and photo filters. While it doesn’t have all the professional bells and whistles of Adobe Lightroom, it’s free!

1. TouchRetouch

This app costs $3.99 and is amazing at removing unwanted elements from photos—everything from individual objects to people! And just as easily, you can also duplicate objects in your images with TouchRetouch.

1. Afterlight

This free app offers basic editing, advanced features like grain and selective hue, as well as artsy overlays such as film light leaks and prism effects to really make your images stand out.

1. Snapspeed

This Google-owned app is free and great for everyday photo editing. Snapspeed has a variety of editing tools that can work manually or automatically with a single click. You can even play around with precision masking, which is where you make the background blurry to bring the primary object more into focus.

Looking for a particular feature or aesthetic? Here are some other apps that we love when you need that little extra something:

• Lens Distortions

This free app adds natural overlays like sunbeams, fog, rain, blurring, shimmer, and lens flares.

• Superimpose X

This app ($4.99) enables you to combine multiple photos together to create fantastical compositions. This is a cool program to play with for artsy campaigns rather than straightforward e-comm shots.

• Foodie

As its name suggests, this free app was made for food photography. It has 30 filters and editing features to make your food photos look good enough to eat.

• VSCO

This is a free app as well as its own social network. While classic-look filters are fun and artsy, they are not always the best choice depending on where you’re sharing these images. If you use VSCO for your Instagram feed or similar social media account, make sure all your images are cohesive (rather than trying out a new filter for each photo).

• Focos

This free app lets you refocus photos you’ve already taken. It’s almost as if you are able to retake the photo by trying out different lens and aperture features.

• GoDaddy Studio

This free app enables you to add text to your photos right from your phone. You can create clever marketing slogans and calls to action to post directly to social media. GoDaddy Studio also lets you easily crop images to fit an Instagram square or story.