Don't Forget Basic Photography Rules
After doing lots of research and asking around, some of the best tips I got were the most obvious (yet rarely heeded) rules of photography. When you use your phone's camera, make sure you aren't forgetting about the basics. We've mentioned a few of these before, but it's always good to go through them again before you dig into the more minute settings.
Use Your Light
It's important with all cameras to make sure your subject is facing the light source and you're not, but it's even more important with cameraphones (Unless, of course, you wantto take a silhouette—like all rules, this can be bent). As I mentioned above, your phone's biggest weakness is its inability to take good pictures in low light, which means you generally will want to get as much light as you possibly can on your subject. This may require a bit more thought and a bit more moving around than it might with a point-and-shoot camera, but you'll thank yourself in the end.
Clean Your Lens
It may seem silly, but give your lens a wipedown before you start snapping photos with your phone. While most people are pretty good about keeping their grubby fingers away from camera lenses, it's not as easily done with cameraphones. If you have a dirty lens, none of the other tips in this article will make your photo look less like crap, so keep it in mind.
Avoid Digital Zoom
You've probably heard this one a million times, but we can't overstate how useless this feature usually is. If you need to get closer to a subject, you're much better off stepping closer to them. If you can't, you can always crop the picture later on, which is all digital zoom really does—you can always crop down, but you can't crop up.
Pay Attention to Your Flash
Sure, LED flashes have been hyped on recent smartphone cameras, but they're not always all they're cracked up to be. If you don't have enough light to work with, they can at least ensure that you get a picture, but a lot of phones tend to use it more often than necessary, and that white LED light can be really harsh. You may find, even in some lower light situations, that turning off the flash will give you a better result, so snap one with and one without if you're ever in doubt. You can always tweak them further in post-processing (which we'll talk about in a moment), so you have nothing to lose by giving yourself options.
If you find that you still need the flash, you can also soften it by placing a thin white sticker over it, like a small piece of tissue or white label. You'll still have some light from the flash, but the sticker will take away a bit of the harshness that tends to make people look ghostly.
Tweak Your Camera App's Settings
Depending on your particular phone and the camera app that comes with it, you may have a few settings you can adjust before taking a picture. In almost every case, though, you can do better by grabbing a more advanced camera app, like CameraZOOM FX for Android orCamera+ for the iPhone. There are a ton out there, so shop around, but those are the two that I've used in the past.
Check Your Resolution
Most camera apps have a setting that allows you to take pictures at differing resolutions. Low resolutions are nice if you're just sending a quick photo via MMS, and they'll save to your phone faster, but if you're taking a photo you want to keep around, you're better off taking it at a higher resolution. It's a simple and obvious tweak, but something you definitely want to check before you start snapping—there's nothing worse than taking a bunch of really cool pictures, only to find out once you put them on your PC that they're just 640x480. (Also worth noting, some phones will resize images when you email them—make sure you send them at full resolution when quality matters.)
Turn On the Stable Shot Setting
Phones are difficult to keep stable while you're getting your shutterbug on, and sometimes it's hard to detect the blur of a shaky photo on a small screen. While you can always rest your elbows on something solid and breathe like a sniper, enabling a stable shot setting in your camera app will help a great deal. This setting will use your phone's accelerometer to measure how much you're shaking the camera, and won't snap the picture until your hand has been steady for a certain amount of time (usually about one or two seconds). Some apps may even let you set the sensitivity of the stable shot, so your phone will wait until you're barely moving to take the photo.
White Balance
Usually, cameraphones are pretty good at detecting the white balance, but when you get into low light they can have trouble. The first thing you can do is give the camera a second to adjust itself—if you just open up the camera app and snap away, you might get a remarkably orange picture . Give it about 5 seconds to adjust itself, and you may get a better-looking shot. You also might try pointing your phone at a different light source, which will adjust your phone to a different balance, then popping back.
However, if you've given your phone a minute to acclimate and the picture still looks off, try adjusting the white balance yourself. You can usually set it to one of a few different light settings, like "daylight", "fluorescent", or "cloudy". You may find that choosing one manually gives you a better result than the auto setting does.
Exposure
As the biggest problem with cameraphones is their inability to make up for low light, the exposure is one of the best settings to play with in dimmer situations. Setting the exposure higher lets more light into the lens, which means kicking it up a notch will likely get you a brighter, more vibrant photo. I've found that exposure tweaks often produce the biggest immediate improvement in my phone's photos.
Salvage Bad Photos with More Extreme Edits
While you're better off tweaking some settings before you take the photo, you can always make a picture look better by editing it a tad after you've downloaded the pictures to your computer . Here are a few simple edits that you can make on your PC to cover up some of your phone's shortcomings. You don't need to be a Photoshop expert to pull these off—in fact, you can make these tweaks in pretty much any photo editor around, whether it's Photoshop, the GIMP, Paint.net, or iPhoto. You can also make these edits in many camera apps if you need to do it on-the-go, but it's always easier to edit a photo when you see it full size than on a dinky phone screen.
Tweak the Color Levels
While some cameras (like the iPhone) have pretty good color, others (like the Droid—which is also, incidentally, my phone) really don't. If adjusting the white balance and flash still don't get you the best results, tweaking the color levels in the photo can definitely make a difference. We've talked about how to get the best colors from your photos before, and it's a good skill to have—but even if you're not an expert photo editor, you can make a few small tweaks that make a world of difference.
Throw your picture into your favorite photoeditor and find the color settings. For example, in GIMP, head to Tools > Color Tools > Levels. In iPhoto, you can just hit the Edit button at the bottom of the windowand then hit Adjust to bring up the color level HUD. Without going too crazy, you can raise the red level a little bit to give skin tones a more natural look. Similarly, you can fix any exposure or contrast issues you still have in the photo—again, a little experimentation will help you find the right tweaks for a given photo.
Go Black & White
If minor color edits aren't helping at all, you can always go full black and white or sepia. This will get rid of any major color issues your picture has, and can salvage a dull picture. Sure, you still may not have color, but you can make the lack of color look more intentional and less like you're just using a bad camera.
Note that while you can take black and white pictures in a lot of camera apps, think hard before doing so. You can always make a color picture black and white , but you can't make a black and white picture color again. Of course, you can always shoot two pictures and save yourself the trouble later on.
Embrace Your Camera's Mediocrity
In the end, you may still be unhappy with some of your cameraphone's photos. After all, while all these tweaks can take your photos from crappy to passable, most phones just can't measure up to a point-and-shoot. However, that doesn't mean you're left without options. A lot of people enjoy using camera apps (like Hipstamatic or previously mentioned Instagram on the iPhone, and FxCamera on Android) that emulate old, cheap, cameras with digital effects.
Surprisingly, it adds a whole new dimension to your photos—so even if you can't get them to look like they came from a $100 Canon, you can give them a lot of style by making them look like they came from a classic LOMO or Polaroid instead. It's a strange trend, but you can't argue with the results—some of the photos produced by these apps are remarkably beautiful (in cases where their cameraphone counterparts would certainly be boring and ugly). If you're not convinced, check out some of the photos in theHipstamatic Flickr group, and you may find yourself singing a different tune.
Of course, you don't need to be taking super artsy shots to make use of this—if, say, your cat happens to do something humorous and you don't have time to grab your real camera, these types of effects can simply make the photo look a little nicer and less like they were taken with your mediocre smartphone camera.
We've mentioned a few good apps in this post, but both the iPhone and Android have tons of great options available. The above are merely the ones that I've personally used, but be sure to check out our favorite photography apps for iPhone and Android to see a few more.
Again, not every one of these tips is applicable in every situation or with every camera. It'll take a little bit of experimentation on your part to find what works best for you, but these should help point you in the direction of better pictures. Of course, if you have your own tips that we haven't mentioned (or you just want to give a thumbs up to one we did), we'd love to hear them in the comments.
The Best Photography Apps for Your iPhone
With the quality of cellphone camerasapproximating that of yesterday's point-and-shoots, you can take some amazing photographs on your iPhone. It gets even better with the rightapps. Here are our favorite photography apps for your iPhone.
Note: For a look at the flip side of the mobile OS coin, check out the best Android apps for photography.
Camera Plus
Your iPhone's default Camera app is pretty great, but it doesn't do much to solve the problems that are inherent with cellphone cameras. Camera Plus adds a few helpful features that do. Two of the most notable are burst mode and anti-shake. Burst mode lets you take a series of photographs quickly to help you get the best possible shot, and anti-shake lets you know when the camera is stable so you can avoid taking blurry photographs. The regular version is free, and the pro version will set you back a reasonable $2. [Camera Plus / Pro; iTunes App Store]
Darkroom
One of the biggest cameraphone annoyances—frankly, it extends to consumer cameras in general—is poor low-light performance. Darkroom is an app that seeks to alleviate this pain. It's specifically geared to take photos in low light. While that's pretty much all it does, it does it well. Darkroom will wait until your iPhone is steady before it snaps the picture, leaving you with the sharpest possible image. When you're done, you can save your photo or upload it to an online album. [Darkroom; iTunes App Store]
Hipstamatic
Hipstamatic is a blast and can be very addictive (so don't say I didn't warn you). It's a camera app that simulates a bunch of analog cameras (mostly of the plastic variety) and creates some pretty stunning effects (check out the Hipstamatic Flickr group for some evidence). While the $2 app includes some starter lenses, flashes, and film stock, you'll quickly find yourself buying new ones from the in-app store if you're not careful. While Hipstamatic is, by far, my favorite camera app on the iPhone, do not buy it if you're not prepared to either restrain yourself or sink at least an extra $5. The fun of Hipstamatic is in making your own camera configurations, but you'll end up with beautiful pictures no matter what configuration you choose. [Hipstamatic; iTunes App Store]
CameraBag
CameraBag makes photographs look like they were taken with a variety of different cameras. Some of the filters are similar to what you'll find in Hipstamatic, but there are a couple of key differences. First, CameraBag offers a more diverse range of effects. Second, you can take a picture within the app but preview the effects before saving them. While the entire process takes a bit longer and doesn't have the quick-snapping fun of Hipstamatic, CameraBag ultimately provides you with a lot more control. It'll run you $2 to give it a go. If you're looking for something between Hipstamatic and CameraBag, take a look at lo-mob. It's very similar to CameraBag in functionality, but provides numerous types of film stocks and camera effects that are closer to what you'll find in Hipstamatic; it's also $2. [CameraBag. / lo-mob; iTunes App Store]
DSLR Remote
DSLR Remote is a pretty amazing piece of work. It lets you use your iOS device to snap photos with your DSLR. You can control all its functionality and even access live view mode on certain cameras (note: this is only available in the pro version). It works by connecting your DSLR to your computer via USB and running a server application. Both your computer and iOS device connect to the same network, letting the server accept instructions from the client. Photos are saved where you specify, and there's very little lag between shots since everything's transferred very quickly over USB. For a walk-through of the whole process, be sure to check out our how-to on DSLR and iOS wireless photography. DSLR Remote is an affordable $2 for the lite version, and a considerably less affordable $20 for the pro version (although I'd argue it's worth it). [DSLR Remote Pro /DSLR Remote Lite; iTunes App Store]
Photo Scatter
Taking photos with your iPhone is great, but they're kind of useless if they just sit on yourphone for the rest of eternity. While the built-in iPhone camera app offers a few sharing options, if you want to get your photos on photo-sharing sites, you may want to give Photo Scatter a try. Photo Scatter works with Flickr, Shutterfly, PhotoBucket, Picasa, Twitter, and Facebook (although, at the time of this writing, Facebook isn't working so well). You set up all the services in advance, and then you can upload photos in your camera roll to any of them with just a few taps. Even better, you can use the app to take photos and upload them immediately after. Photo Scatter is free and is a great app, but it's worth noting that they're having a few issues with Facebook and the developers are currently overwhelmed with fixing the issue. It might be a little while before things get resolved, but it's a free app so it's not as though you'll be losing anything by giving it a shot. [Photo Scatter; iTunes App Store]
Specialty Camera Apps
You'll find far more than three "specialty" camera apps in the iTunes App Store—some of which you'll find in the honorable mentions, but Pano ($2), ProHDR (Free), and TiltShift ($2) are the three we'd download first to bolster our phone's camera chops.
Pano
Like its name suggests, Pano takes a series of successive photos, then stitches them all into a panorama. As you take your series of photographs, it'll guide you to help you make sure the edges overlap. While the results I got were better using Autostitch, another panorama-making app, Pano's stronger feature is that it allows you to take the photos and helps you throughout the process. [Pano; iTunes App Store]
ProHDR
ProHDR brings HDR photography to more than just the iPhone 4, allowing 3GS users to get in on the fun. Even if you're an iPhone 4 user, ProHDR provides you with a lot more control than the default options offered natively in iOS. You can adjusts brightness, contrast, color, and more after taking an HDR photo, often allowing for better results. Plus it's free, so there's no harm in giving it a try. [ProHDR; iTunes App Store]
TiltShift
TiltShift is a little less practical than Pano and ProHDR, but if you like tilt shift photography, it's a fun choice for your iPhone photography collection. If you're not familiar, tilt shift photography is made possible by special lenses that use tilt to achieve a selective focus. This usually results in a miniaturization effect that's much easier to see than explain, so check out this Flickr group for some examples. While TiltShift isn't a proper substitute for the exceptionally expensive lenses you need to create official tilt shift photography, for a much cheaper price of $2 it comes close enough. TiltShift gives you plenty of effect options, like choosing different shapes for your bokeh (the rendering of out-of-focus areas of the photo, sometimes referred to as "background blur" even though that's not fully accurate). [TiltShift; iTunes App Store]
Honorable Mentions
There are too many awesome photography apps for the iPhone to list here, but we want to give a few more their due. Here are some honorable mentions worth checking out if the short list isn't enough to satiate your photographic hunger.
• Adobe Photoshop Express - Not the best of mobile photo editors, but it's free and can handle a few important tasks.
• Blendcam - Blendcam is a photo app that lets you combine multiple exposures easily. It's simple, focused, and free.
• OldBooth - OldBooth is a $2 app that takes old-fashioned photos. Beyond the aging effects, you can add new hairstyles to make your subject appear to be from a given era.
• Comic Touch - Comic Touch is a photo manipulation app that lets you distort faces in funny ways, add comic-style captions, and email your creations to your friends. $3.
• PhotoCurves / Free - PhotoCurves adds the popular curves color and tone alteration tool to your iPhone. The free version only allows you to work in the RGB colorspace. $2 for the full version will get you CMYK and CIELAB as well.
• Polarize - Polarize is a free app that generates Polaroid-style photos on your iPhone. You can write on them, too!
• PhotoCalc - If you're more of a pro, PhotoCalc won't actually take or manipulate photos, but it will help you calculate exposure reciprocation, depth of field, and flash exposure for your D/SLR.
• Animoto - If you're looking to make photo slideshows, Animoto is one of the best apps for the task. The app is free, but you can do more with a pro account.
Did we miss any great photo apps you love? Let's us know in the comments!
After doing lots of research and asking around, some of the best tips I got were the most obvious (yet rarely heeded) rules of photography. When you use your phone's camera, make sure you aren't forgetting about the basics. We've mentioned a few of these before, but it's always good to go through them again before you dig into the more minute settings.
Use Your Light
It's important with all cameras to make sure your subject is facing the light source and you're not, but it's even more important with cameraphones (Unless, of course, you wantto take a silhouette—like all rules, this can be bent). As I mentioned above, your phone's biggest weakness is its inability to take good pictures in low light, which means you generally will want to get as much light as you possibly can on your subject. This may require a bit more thought and a bit more moving around than it might with a point-and-shoot camera, but you'll thank yourself in the end.
Clean Your Lens
It may seem silly, but give your lens a wipedown before you start snapping photos with your phone. While most people are pretty good about keeping their grubby fingers away from camera lenses, it's not as easily done with cameraphones. If you have a dirty lens, none of the other tips in this article will make your photo look less like crap, so keep it in mind.
Avoid Digital Zoom
You've probably heard this one a million times, but we can't overstate how useless this feature usually is. If you need to get closer to a subject, you're much better off stepping closer to them. If you can't, you can always crop the picture later on, which is all digital zoom really does—you can always crop down, but you can't crop up.
Pay Attention to Your Flash
Sure, LED flashes have been hyped on recent smartphone cameras, but they're not always all they're cracked up to be. If you don't have enough light to work with, they can at least ensure that you get a picture, but a lot of phones tend to use it more often than necessary, and that white LED light can be really harsh. You may find, even in some lower light situations, that turning off the flash will give you a better result, so snap one with and one without if you're ever in doubt. You can always tweak them further in post-processing (which we'll talk about in a moment), so you have nothing to lose by giving yourself options.
If you find that you still need the flash, you can also soften it by placing a thin white sticker over it, like a small piece of tissue or white label. You'll still have some light from the flash, but the sticker will take away a bit of the harshness that tends to make people look ghostly.
Tweak Your Camera App's Settings
Depending on your particular phone and the camera app that comes with it, you may have a few settings you can adjust before taking a picture. In almost every case, though, you can do better by grabbing a more advanced camera app, like CameraZOOM FX for Android orCamera+ for the iPhone. There are a ton out there, so shop around, but those are the two that I've used in the past.
Check Your Resolution
Most camera apps have a setting that allows you to take pictures at differing resolutions. Low resolutions are nice if you're just sending a quick photo via MMS, and they'll save to your phone faster, but if you're taking a photo you want to keep around, you're better off taking it at a higher resolution. It's a simple and obvious tweak, but something you definitely want to check before you start snapping—there's nothing worse than taking a bunch of really cool pictures, only to find out once you put them on your PC that they're just 640x480. (Also worth noting, some phones will resize images when you email them—make sure you send them at full resolution when quality matters.)
Turn On the Stable Shot Setting
Phones are difficult to keep stable while you're getting your shutterbug on, and sometimes it's hard to detect the blur of a shaky photo on a small screen. While you can always rest your elbows on something solid and breathe like a sniper, enabling a stable shot setting in your camera app will help a great deal. This setting will use your phone's accelerometer to measure how much you're shaking the camera, and won't snap the picture until your hand has been steady for a certain amount of time (usually about one or two seconds). Some apps may even let you set the sensitivity of the stable shot, so your phone will wait until you're barely moving to take the photo.
White Balance
Usually, cameraphones are pretty good at detecting the white balance, but when you get into low light they can have trouble. The first thing you can do is give the camera a second to adjust itself—if you just open up the camera app and snap away, you might get a remarkably orange picture . Give it about 5 seconds to adjust itself, and you may get a better-looking shot. You also might try pointing your phone at a different light source, which will adjust your phone to a different balance, then popping back.
However, if you've given your phone a minute to acclimate and the picture still looks off, try adjusting the white balance yourself. You can usually set it to one of a few different light settings, like "daylight", "fluorescent", or "cloudy". You may find that choosing one manually gives you a better result than the auto setting does.
Exposure
As the biggest problem with cameraphones is their inability to make up for low light, the exposure is one of the best settings to play with in dimmer situations. Setting the exposure higher lets more light into the lens, which means kicking it up a notch will likely get you a brighter, more vibrant photo. I've found that exposure tweaks often produce the biggest immediate improvement in my phone's photos.
Salvage Bad Photos with More Extreme Edits
While you're better off tweaking some settings before you take the photo, you can always make a picture look better by editing it a tad after you've downloaded the pictures to your computer . Here are a few simple edits that you can make on your PC to cover up some of your phone's shortcomings. You don't need to be a Photoshop expert to pull these off—in fact, you can make these tweaks in pretty much any photo editor around, whether it's Photoshop, the GIMP, Paint.net, or iPhoto. You can also make these edits in many camera apps if you need to do it on-the-go, but it's always easier to edit a photo when you see it full size than on a dinky phone screen.
Tweak the Color Levels
While some cameras (like the iPhone) have pretty good color, others (like the Droid—which is also, incidentally, my phone) really don't. If adjusting the white balance and flash still don't get you the best results, tweaking the color levels in the photo can definitely make a difference. We've talked about how to get the best colors from your photos before, and it's a good skill to have—but even if you're not an expert photo editor, you can make a few small tweaks that make a world of difference.
Throw your picture into your favorite photoeditor and find the color settings. For example, in GIMP, head to Tools > Color Tools > Levels. In iPhoto, you can just hit the Edit button at the bottom of the windowand then hit Adjust to bring up the color level HUD. Without going too crazy, you can raise the red level a little bit to give skin tones a more natural look. Similarly, you can fix any exposure or contrast issues you still have in the photo—again, a little experimentation will help you find the right tweaks for a given photo.
Go Black & White
If minor color edits aren't helping at all, you can always go full black and white or sepia. This will get rid of any major color issues your picture has, and can salvage a dull picture. Sure, you still may not have color, but you can make the lack of color look more intentional and less like you're just using a bad camera.
Note that while you can take black and white pictures in a lot of camera apps, think hard before doing so. You can always make a color picture black and white , but you can't make a black and white picture color again. Of course, you can always shoot two pictures and save yourself the trouble later on.
Embrace Your Camera's Mediocrity
In the end, you may still be unhappy with some of your cameraphone's photos. After all, while all these tweaks can take your photos from crappy to passable, most phones just can't measure up to a point-and-shoot. However, that doesn't mean you're left without options. A lot of people enjoy using camera apps (like Hipstamatic or previously mentioned Instagram on the iPhone, and FxCamera on Android) that emulate old, cheap, cameras with digital effects.
Surprisingly, it adds a whole new dimension to your photos—so even if you can't get them to look like they came from a $100 Canon, you can give them a lot of style by making them look like they came from a classic LOMO or Polaroid instead. It's a strange trend, but you can't argue with the results—some of the photos produced by these apps are remarkably beautiful (in cases where their cameraphone counterparts would certainly be boring and ugly). If you're not convinced, check out some of the photos in theHipstamatic Flickr group, and you may find yourself singing a different tune.
Of course, you don't need to be taking super artsy shots to make use of this—if, say, your cat happens to do something humorous and you don't have time to grab your real camera, these types of effects can simply make the photo look a little nicer and less like they were taken with your mediocre smartphone camera.
We've mentioned a few good apps in this post, but both the iPhone and Android have tons of great options available. The above are merely the ones that I've personally used, but be sure to check out our favorite photography apps for iPhone and Android to see a few more.
Again, not every one of these tips is applicable in every situation or with every camera. It'll take a little bit of experimentation on your part to find what works best for you, but these should help point you in the direction of better pictures. Of course, if you have your own tips that we haven't mentioned (or you just want to give a thumbs up to one we did), we'd love to hear them in the comments.
The Best Photography Apps for Your iPhone
With the quality of cellphone camerasapproximating that of yesterday's point-and-shoots, you can take some amazing photographs on your iPhone. It gets even better with the rightapps. Here are our favorite photography apps for your iPhone.
Note: For a look at the flip side of the mobile OS coin, check out the best Android apps for photography.
Camera Plus
Your iPhone's default Camera app is pretty great, but it doesn't do much to solve the problems that are inherent with cellphone cameras. Camera Plus adds a few helpful features that do. Two of the most notable are burst mode and anti-shake. Burst mode lets you take a series of photographs quickly to help you get the best possible shot, and anti-shake lets you know when the camera is stable so you can avoid taking blurry photographs. The regular version is free, and the pro version will set you back a reasonable $2. [Camera Plus / Pro; iTunes App Store]
Darkroom
One of the biggest cameraphone annoyances—frankly, it extends to consumer cameras in general—is poor low-light performance. Darkroom is an app that seeks to alleviate this pain. It's specifically geared to take photos in low light. While that's pretty much all it does, it does it well. Darkroom will wait until your iPhone is steady before it snaps the picture, leaving you with the sharpest possible image. When you're done, you can save your photo or upload it to an online album. [Darkroom; iTunes App Store]
Hipstamatic
Hipstamatic is a blast and can be very addictive (so don't say I didn't warn you). It's a camera app that simulates a bunch of analog cameras (mostly of the plastic variety) and creates some pretty stunning effects (check out the Hipstamatic Flickr group for some evidence). While the $2 app includes some starter lenses, flashes, and film stock, you'll quickly find yourself buying new ones from the in-app store if you're not careful. While Hipstamatic is, by far, my favorite camera app on the iPhone, do not buy it if you're not prepared to either restrain yourself or sink at least an extra $5. The fun of Hipstamatic is in making your own camera configurations, but you'll end up with beautiful pictures no matter what configuration you choose. [Hipstamatic; iTunes App Store]
CameraBag
CameraBag makes photographs look like they were taken with a variety of different cameras. Some of the filters are similar to what you'll find in Hipstamatic, but there are a couple of key differences. First, CameraBag offers a more diverse range of effects. Second, you can take a picture within the app but preview the effects before saving them. While the entire process takes a bit longer and doesn't have the quick-snapping fun of Hipstamatic, CameraBag ultimately provides you with a lot more control. It'll run you $2 to give it a go. If you're looking for something between Hipstamatic and CameraBag, take a look at lo-mob. It's very similar to CameraBag in functionality, but provides numerous types of film stocks and camera effects that are closer to what you'll find in Hipstamatic; it's also $2. [CameraBag. / lo-mob; iTunes App Store]
DSLR Remote
DSLR Remote is a pretty amazing piece of work. It lets you use your iOS device to snap photos with your DSLR. You can control all its functionality and even access live view mode on certain cameras (note: this is only available in the pro version). It works by connecting your DSLR to your computer via USB and running a server application. Both your computer and iOS device connect to the same network, letting the server accept instructions from the client. Photos are saved where you specify, and there's very little lag between shots since everything's transferred very quickly over USB. For a walk-through of the whole process, be sure to check out our how-to on DSLR and iOS wireless photography. DSLR Remote is an affordable $2 for the lite version, and a considerably less affordable $20 for the pro version (although I'd argue it's worth it). [DSLR Remote Pro /DSLR Remote Lite; iTunes App Store]
Photo Scatter
Taking photos with your iPhone is great, but they're kind of useless if they just sit on yourphone for the rest of eternity. While the built-in iPhone camera app offers a few sharing options, if you want to get your photos on photo-sharing sites, you may want to give Photo Scatter a try. Photo Scatter works with Flickr, Shutterfly, PhotoBucket, Picasa, Twitter, and Facebook (although, at the time of this writing, Facebook isn't working so well). You set up all the services in advance, and then you can upload photos in your camera roll to any of them with just a few taps. Even better, you can use the app to take photos and upload them immediately after. Photo Scatter is free and is a great app, but it's worth noting that they're having a few issues with Facebook and the developers are currently overwhelmed with fixing the issue. It might be a little while before things get resolved, but it's a free app so it's not as though you'll be losing anything by giving it a shot. [Photo Scatter; iTunes App Store]
Specialty Camera Apps
You'll find far more than three "specialty" camera apps in the iTunes App Store—some of which you'll find in the honorable mentions, but Pano ($2), ProHDR (Free), and TiltShift ($2) are the three we'd download first to bolster our phone's camera chops.
Pano
Like its name suggests, Pano takes a series of successive photos, then stitches them all into a panorama. As you take your series of photographs, it'll guide you to help you make sure the edges overlap. While the results I got were better using Autostitch, another panorama-making app, Pano's stronger feature is that it allows you to take the photos and helps you throughout the process. [Pano; iTunes App Store]
ProHDR
ProHDR brings HDR photography to more than just the iPhone 4, allowing 3GS users to get in on the fun. Even if you're an iPhone 4 user, ProHDR provides you with a lot more control than the default options offered natively in iOS. You can adjusts brightness, contrast, color, and more after taking an HDR photo, often allowing for better results. Plus it's free, so there's no harm in giving it a try. [ProHDR; iTunes App Store]
TiltShift
TiltShift is a little less practical than Pano and ProHDR, but if you like tilt shift photography, it's a fun choice for your iPhone photography collection. If you're not familiar, tilt shift photography is made possible by special lenses that use tilt to achieve a selective focus. This usually results in a miniaturization effect that's much easier to see than explain, so check out this Flickr group for some examples. While TiltShift isn't a proper substitute for the exceptionally expensive lenses you need to create official tilt shift photography, for a much cheaper price of $2 it comes close enough. TiltShift gives you plenty of effect options, like choosing different shapes for your bokeh (the rendering of out-of-focus areas of the photo, sometimes referred to as "background blur" even though that's not fully accurate). [TiltShift; iTunes App Store]
Honorable Mentions
There are too many awesome photography apps for the iPhone to list here, but we want to give a few more their due. Here are some honorable mentions worth checking out if the short list isn't enough to satiate your photographic hunger.
• Adobe Photoshop Express - Not the best of mobile photo editors, but it's free and can handle a few important tasks.
• Blendcam - Blendcam is a photo app that lets you combine multiple exposures easily. It's simple, focused, and free.
• OldBooth - OldBooth is a $2 app that takes old-fashioned photos. Beyond the aging effects, you can add new hairstyles to make your subject appear to be from a given era.
• Comic Touch - Comic Touch is a photo manipulation app that lets you distort faces in funny ways, add comic-style captions, and email your creations to your friends. $3.
• PhotoCurves / Free - PhotoCurves adds the popular curves color and tone alteration tool to your iPhone. The free version only allows you to work in the RGB colorspace. $2 for the full version will get you CMYK and CIELAB as well.
• Polarize - Polarize is a free app that generates Polaroid-style photos on your iPhone. You can write on them, too!
• PhotoCalc - If you're more of a pro, PhotoCalc won't actually take or manipulate photos, but it will help you calculate exposure reciprocation, depth of field, and flash exposure for your D/SLR.
• Animoto - If you're looking to make photo slideshows, Animoto is one of the best apps for the task. The app is free, but you can do more with a pro account.
Did we miss any great photo apps you love? Let's us know in the comments!
