1. Camera- I know everyone wants to hear about new apps, but I always use the built in camera app to take my photos because it rarely crashes and gets the most consistent results. Nothing worse than losing a great shot because an app crashed!
2. Camera+– For cropping, adjusting, filtering and adding borders, this app is unbeatable. It also has some advanced camera options, but you don’t want to risk losing a good shot because your app crashed.
3. DXP– My favorite app for overlaying photos on top of each other. After altering an image in multiple apps, I often use DXP to merge all the different images back together.
4. AutoStitch Panorama– My favorite panorama app. Take several pictures of the object you want, then use AutoStitch to automatically join them. I used to use this app all the time before I got my fisheye lens for iPhone from Photojojo.
5. ToonPAINT– Turn any image into a stylized line drawing. This app is AWESOME when combined with other apps. It also does some sort of coloring book thing, but I never use that.
6. Percolator– A cool app to distort any image into a series of bubbles. That sounds really useless, doesn’t it? Well, the results are often really cool.
7. Decim8– I love making glitchy artwork with my iPhone and Decim8 has quickly become my favorite app for that. It has several different effects that you can combine and re-arrange to data mosh any image.
8. Juxtaposer– Another great app for layering images together, but where DXP simply overlays those images, Juxtaposer allows you to cut sections from one image and rotate/drag/scale them onto another however you like. Great for creating montages.
9. Diptic– Allows you to take multiple images and arrange them into a single graphic. Because of it’s square shape, Diptic works great for Instagram, but it’s also got more features for editing your images and borders than most other apps.
10. GB Camera- I feel weird including this on the list because it’s no longer available on the app store, but GB Camera is honestly one of my favorite apps to experiment with. The basic idea is that you can “pixelate” any image to look like it was made on a Gameboy. I love taking these modded images, then using DXP to overlay them with the original image. I wrote the developer and he says he’s working on bringing GB Camera back to the app store. FYI, the developer does have another app called C64 Camera available, but I don’t recommend it. It doesn’t offer any of the settings and options that GB Camera does, and it crops images in a weird way.
11. AsciiMe– Turn any image into ASCII art. On it’s own, not that awesome, but when combined with DXP or Juxtaposer, this app is really fun. There are plenty of other image to ASCII generators out there, this is just the sleekest.
12. Instagram– Obviously I’m a fan of Instagram’s social networking service, but their filter’s are great too. Before I started using the service I thought filtering images was kind of lame, but once I started applying filters to screen shots from other apps or web pages, I actually started to see the appeal of taking ordinary things and turning them up a notch. Insta-BAM!
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