While a mobile phone camera is no comparison to a digital SLR camera, I’ve found that my iPhone is much more suited to the type of photography that I enjoy and allows me to streamline my workflow considerably. Lugging around a bulky removable lens camera is the least of my issues – the main gripe I have with an SLR is that people freeze up as soon as I point it at them. An iPhone isn’t very threatening, but still lets me capture real-life moments like getting handed an ice cream cone or getting a brain dump from a street artist.

The other advantage of mobile phone photography is the ability to snap, edit and post images online in under a minute. Anyone that has hung out with me has experienced this flow as I tune out of the conversation for a few sentences. I rationalize this as being better than waiting 2 months for me to get around to offloading high resolution images from my digital SLR, getting lost in all the fine tuning in photoshop and then sending them huge files so they can have a new Facebook profile “pic”.

Not only have mobile phone camera sensors improved, the applications to edit the images keep getting better. In this post, I chose a simple photo of a car on a street in Buenos Aires from my iPhone photo library and edited it with four iPhone photo apps to show the differences that post production can make on an image.

First, I used the ShakeIt Photo app, a fun app that I believe was the first iPhone photo app that I purchased a few years ago. A one trick pony, the app lets you snap a photo and shake your phone (like a Polaroid picture) to produce images that, well, look like a Polaroid. Having limited settings and a single frame makes this my go-to app for quick edit and send situations. Also note that the app auto-crops the image down to a square, which in this case, cut off the yellow street sign and second doorway.

The next photo app that I chose was CrossProcess, another simple iPhone app from the makers of ShakeIt Photo. As the name indicates, this app simply emulates the look of cross processing film – creating some interesting color variations and a nice feel most of the time. This app has a few more options than the ShakeIt Photo app, but still rather basic with options like turning the frame on or off or selecting which color processes to use. I’ve had this app for a long time and don’t really use it much anymore, mainly because I can’t control the amount of contrast which is a bit frustrating.

The next app is my current go-to photo app for the iPhone – Camera+ (not to be mistaken with another app called CameraPlus).  While I’ll state my complaint right up front – this app is SLOW – it has a lot of advantages that make it my most used photo app. Camera+ is more than just a post processing tool like the others above. When taking a photo with the app, it allows the user to select the focal point and exposure point separately - a handy feature I now use without thinking and miss when I use the native iPhone camera. In terms of post-processing, Camera+ gives you just enough to be able to play around with filters and frames, but not enough to get lost. It usually takes me about 45-60 seconds to snap a photo, edit and publish it online with this app. So while I curse it every time that I open the app and wait 5-10 second for it to become functional, the end result is quite good.

The last iPhone photo app that I chose to use was my newest discovery, SnapSeed.

Basically, this is as close to Photoshop on your iPhone as you can (currently) get. Using any photo from your camera roll, you can use a wide array of tools to crop, straighten, sharpen and otherwise adjust the images taken with the native iPhone camera. The interface isn’t extremely intuitive, but then again, it has to be tough to cram in this much into a small iPhone screen. There are a lot of features and options that I have yet to use, including several blur-related filters with manual controls to create depth of field and tilt-shift effects.

The big difference with SnapSeed vs. any of the other apps mentioned here is the ability to selectively edit parts of the image. As seen in this screenshot of my edits, I chose to bring up the brightness around the flat tire that got lost in the processing with other apps.

A downside to this app – I wind up taking 4-5 minutes to edit a photo. Is it worth the extra time?

note: I purchased all of these iPhone photo apps at full retail price and have no affiliation with any of the developers of these apps.