5 Free & Cool Photo Apps

Being an iPhone user, I'm a sucker for cool photography apps. Most aren't free, but spending between .99 cents and $4.99 isn't much to have access to some ultra-cool features right on your phone. In addition to the apps you have to pay for, there are several free ones that have a lot of great features. Except for a few, these don't do as much as the paid apps, but you can still get a lot of use out of these and it won't cost you anything.

First, I need to point out that I use an iPhone 3G which is now two generations old (sometimes I refer to it as my iBrick). The iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 both have cameras far superior to mine. The resolution in the iPhone 4 puts the 3G to shame. Alas, this is what I'm stuck with for now. I recently became eligible for an upgrade, but at this point it would be well worth it to hold out for the next generation iPhone. No sense in getting locked into a two year contract with a phone that will (hopefully) be upgraded in a few months.

Nevertheless, I still use the 3G camera to take pictures and enjoy playing with different apps to see what combinations will give me something interesting…even though the image sometimes is a bit grainy and slightly out of focus (iBrick). The other great thing is that with many of these apps you can upload your photo to Twitter or Facebook directly from the app...no saving and attaching, etc.

There are hundreds of photography apps to choose from and many don't cost anything. Here's 5 free apps I use on a pretty regular basis along with a sample photo I took and edited using only that app. These are only for iPhone, but no matter what smart phone you use you should be able to find something comparable that is also free.

The descriptions are taken from their listings on iTunes . 

1. PhotoShop Express 

Adobe Photoshop Express software lets you use simple gestures to quickly edit and share photos from your mobile device. Enjoy having your photo and video library right in your hand — without wasting your device's valuable storage space.

Photoshop Express is a companion to Photoshop.com, your online photo sharing, editing, and hosting resource. Create a free Photoshop.com account to upload and store 2GB of photos and videos online.

HAVE FUN ON THE RUN
With Photoshop Express, it's easy to improve your photos. Choose from a variety of one-touch effects, or simply drag your finger across the screen to crop, rotate, or adjust color. Add artistic filters like Soft Focus or Sketch. And never fear: You can undo and redo changes until you get just the look you want—a copy of your original file is always saved.

Top editing features:
• Basics: Crop, Straighten, Rotate, and Flip
• Color: Exposure, Saturation, Tint, Black and White, and Contrast
• Filters: Sketch, Soft Focus, and Sharpen
• Effects: Vibrant, Pop, Border, Vignette Blur, Warm Vintage, Rainbow, White Glow, and Soft Black and White
• Borders: Rectangle, Rounded, Oval, Soft Edge, Vignette, Rough Edge, Halftone, and Film Emulsion

SHOW ON THE GO
Photoshop Express lets you access your entire online photo and video library directly from your Photoshop.com account. Relive memories with your friends and family anytime, anywhere. Show off all your favorite photos and videos with instant slideshows. It's like having thousands of photos and videos right in your pocket!

2. Instagram 

Instagram is an amazingly fun & simple life-sharing app for your iPhone. Snap photos wherever you go to show the world what’s going on in your life. Follow your friends’ photo updates as they move through the world. Select from photo filters that transform regular ol’ photos into works of art you’ll want to keep around forever.

Features include:
- Apply over a dozen fun & beautiful filters to your photos
- Post as many photos as you want, for free
- Find and follow friends who are using the app
- Attach (optional) location information to any of your posts
- Share your posts to Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Posterous, & Facebook
- Check in to Foursquare when you post a photo with a location
- Let your friends know what you think by liking & commenting on their photos
- View the most popular photos around the world from Instagram users
- Supports first generation, 3G, 3GS and iPhone 4 phones
- Full iPhone 4 front & back camera support

3. Color Effects

Create dramatic images by showing only specific parts of an image in color or changing colors entirely. 

Images are converted automatically to black and white. You then color specific parts by swiping your finger over the image to restore the original color or recolor the image with any color of your choice.

FEATURES:
+ Supports iPhone 4 Retina display and iPad HD resolution
+ Use Photo Library or camera images
+ Import photos directly from Facebook
+ Multiple levels of undo
+ Paint with original color
+ Recolor image with any color of your choice
+ Paint in black and white
+ Select brush size and transparency
+ Save paintings to Photo Library
+ Email paintings to friends
+ Post to your Facebook wall
+ Post to the Color Effects public Facebook wall.
+ Fully zoomable (use two fingers)
+ Removable buttons (three-finger-tap to clear/restore.

4. Old Photo Pro

"Old Photo PRO" is a fully functional and free application for transforming photographs.

Find out how your photos would look like if you took them decades ago!

You can let the application do the whole work, or choose to edit the photo manually, changing its saturation, paper type, film color and more.

Save the results or share them with your friends, using the direct send option.

5. Photo Wizard - Lite

Powerful photo editor for editing your photos on iPhone/iPod. Either on the full image or selectively apply filters with advanced image masking tools. Mask a portion of an image with a magic touch. Apply any filter to the unmasked portion from a wider range of filter choices. Apply multiple filters to achieve custom effects. For example you can easily create color splash, hue splash, tilt shift etc. just by combining mask and filters.

● Mask image with magic touch, color, brush or shape.
● Free effects/filters.
● Unlimited undo/redo (Swipe left/right on the home screen)
● Adjust filter parameters according to your liking.
● Accumulate multiple filters to achieve unique effect.
● Crop, Straighten, Rotate, Flip with touch.
● Auto-Save session.
● Resume last session in a fraction of a second.
● Save, E-Mail, share in Facebook, Twitter.
● Intuitive UI design.
● Video tutorials.
● Instructions.
● Retina Display support for iPhone 4.

The full version has many more effects/filters, can export images with full resolution and has unlimited masking undo/redo.

My Smartphone's 2010 Faves

I'm way behind on my blogging. More frequent blogging was an unofficial new years resolution of mine and I'm off to a poor start. This is my first post of the new year.

I had planned on doing a post with some of my favorite iPhone photos from the past year. I'm still using an iPhone 3G (or what I commonly refer to as my iBrick). I was pretty excited when I started making photos using some of the available apps. Now, however, the iPhone 4 sports a camera that puts mine to shame. Nevertheless, I still use mine fairly often and am holding out for the next version of the iPhone before purchasing an upgrade. I'm long overdo .

The Best Camera Is The One That's With You says it all.

What I See Right Now

If you've been following me on Twitter, you may have noticed that for the last several days I've been posting a "what I see right now" shot which literally is what I see at that moment. I'll pick a random time of the day, take a pic of what I see with the iPhone, do all of the editing using iPhone apps, and then upload it to Twitter.

Doing this usually takes no more that a few minutes and I upload it right away before I move from that spot, so it literally is what I'm seeing at that very moment. 

I use several different apps for editing: PS Mobile, Best Camera, CameraBag & Hipstamatic. Frequently I'll use more than one to achieve different effects.

So what's the point? I was listening to a photography podcast...wish I could remember which one because I listen to several...and the host was quoting another photographer when he said that "there isn't anything that's not worth photographing." This statement reaffirmed my belief that art is everywhere if you know how to look. Having a camera in my phone gives me the opportunity to capture it  anytime or anywhere, and I like the ability to instantly edit and share while I'm still looking at the subject.

You can follow me on Twitter here, and if you do Facebook you can find me here.

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First Day of Spring in N. Texas

Yes, this indeed was the scene on the first day of Spring in North TX. McKinney got about 6" of snow. This one was taken through a window, obviously. The warmth inside causing drops of water to form on the outside of the window facing a snow covered field.   

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Faux Polaroid Fun

...or just chop their heads off.

I love the look of photos that look like they were an accident. This is the kind of art I used to see in our photo albums growing up. Not a throw-away, dang-it, we paid to have it developed so it's going in the album. Even if it was done with a Polaroid camera, you only get 12 pictures per pack of film, so if it comes out wrong, so be it. That film wasn't cheap, so we kept every single picture, even if their heads were chopped off.

I did this entirely on my iPhone using the Camera Bag app.

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Friends and their Roots

Okay, so this entry isn't really about photography...

Above is an iPhone picture of a piece of a dead tree that was still being held by stakes and not even in the ground. I took this while I was out on a walk with Julia yesterday.

Julia and I had a long conversation during our walk. It's rare that her and I ever get to talk at length about anything, so I really enjoyed our time together.  

As an 11 year old, she feels the need to plan out a good portion of her life now. She and her best friend are planning on going to veterinary school together and apparently they know they are going to be "best friends for life."  My job as Dad is just to smile and say "That's great!" She also mentioned another girl, also named Julia, that used to live down the street from us and how they used to be best friends until she moved away. I talked to her about how hard it is for some people to stay in touch after they move away...people get older and change, they meet new people, they become interested in new things...etc. Julia wondered if the other Julia ever thought about her or even remembers her.

We do live in the age of email, but, obviously, not all young kids know how to use email or are even allowed to use it. But for us adults, really there's no excuse for not staying in touch with people who mean something to you, assuming the friendship is mutual.

I told Julia about a good friend of mine named Craig who moved away when I was about her age. We kept in touch by actually writing letters for several years (this is WAAY before email). By the time we were around 14, I guess we both had moved on with our lives and the letters stopped. I never forgot about Craig. I tried looking him up on-line years later but never had any success. Then a couple of months ago guess who I got an email from...30 years after we had last been in contact. Turns out he's into photography, too. Pretty funny.

So I told Julia that it's very possible that sometime in the future, perhaps even 30 years from now, she might hear from the other Julia, but don't expect that from everyone. I've had more good friends than I can count just drop off the face of the planet. I'm talking about close friends, not just casual acquaintances. The best man at my wedding, by best friend when I lived in Greensboro, NC...lots of people in the last 20 years.

But as far as my childhood friends go, from High School and earlier, I'm actually in touch with ALL of them. Craig was the last one on the list.  

 My final advice to Julia...if a friendship is meaningful enough you'll both find a way to stay in touch years from now. Also stay away from boys.

Wet

There's been lots of the wet stuff in North Texas lately. I've counted 10 straight days. At least on my street. I've been itching to get out and do some shooting, but not in the rain. Instead, I take out the iPhone...yes, I'm blogging about iPhone photography yet again.

 This is the hood of my car during a light drizzle around 5pm. Edited entirely with the Best Camera app right on the iPhone.

 Three entries in a row about cool stuff you can do on the iPhone. Apple should send me a free one. (hint - I don't have the 3GS yet). 

Update on Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 10:13AM by Haberkern Photo

 All the rain has put the TX population of fire ants into hyper-mode. Ant mounds are popping up everywhere. Some over a foot high. Here's an example. Yes, taken with my iPhone.

On a side note, this was my 100th post!

More iPhone Camera Hype

I have been having a blast taking pics with my iPhone. I guess I'm still buzzed about the new Chase Jarvis book, and especially that iPhone app called Best Camera. Just the fact that you can actually stack the filters makes it SOOOO much fun. My Facebook and Twitter friends are probably pretty tired of seeing the strange stuff I've been posting. After this week I'll probably give it a break...maybe. 

The other thing I've noticed is that I can photograph from perspectives not normally seen through a camera lens. The iPhone is small (as is any camera phone) so you can hold it in ways you can't hold a camera. This sometimes gives you a whole different view of the subject.

Coincidentally, Adobe Photoshop has just released their own version of an iPhone app called PS Mobile. Again, you can add different filters to an image but you can't easily rearrange their order without starting from scratch (like you can with Best Camera). The one good feature is that you can crop the image. Best Camera doesn't have that ability.

iPhone: Best Camera

If you follow me on Twitter or if you're part of my Facebook family, you will have noticed I've been posting a whole bunch of iPhone pics lately.

There are two reasons for this. First, my iPhone is the camera I always have with me. If I see something interesting, I can whip it out and grab a pic. Whereas before I would have to drag out the big camera but by the time I got it out and determined what settings to use, I've lost the shot.

Second reason: A new iPhone app called Best Camera. This was developed by photographer Chase Jarvis who just came out with a new book, The Best Camera is The One That's With You. Very true.

The book just arrived in the mail and I've also been having tons-o-fun with the Best Camera app. It has multiple filters you can apply to your images and you can stack them. You can also share your images on Facebook, Twitter or email with the touch of a button. There isn't a photo editing app available anywhere that can do all of those things.

The book and this app came at just the right time for me. Since I've been in a rule-breaking mood, I now have a new tool to do it with. 

If you want a little more info check out this video: