My favorite photo apps for the iPhonehole

Since I began sharing my Daily App Experiment on Instagram, one of the most common questions I get asked is “What are your favorite photo apps”. Here is my list

my favorite iPhone camera apps

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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11 responses to “My favorite photo apps for the iPhonehole

  1. Chris Daniels Avatar

    Sweet review. Maybe some sample shots from each would be cool. I gotta get on that instagram bandwagon..

  2. Foomandoonian Avatar

    I love discovering new creative apps. I just bought Decim8, Juxtaposer and DXP on the basis of this list. I’m particularly looking forward to trying out DXP.

    I do a lot of experimenting with these apps too. You’ll quickly spot what I like most at http://footographs.tumblr.com/

    Cheers!

  3. DocPop Avatar

    That’s awesome, thanks for letting me know about your app experiments!

  4. […] but it’s interesting to note that many of them didn’t even exist when I compiled my favorite photography app list in January. Things change so fast! ← BAC yo-yo contest is this weekend blog comments […]

  5. zetaceti Avatar
    zetaceti

    Do you think 2Bit Camera from the same developer (Epicore) might be their replacement for GB Camera due to a cease and desist from Nintendo on the use of “GB”? I’m enjoying playing with the apps you mentioned on Photojojo that were not mentioned here (SlitScan, SynthCam, etc.).

  6. DocPop Avatar

    Hey Zetaceti, thanks for the comment. 2Bit is totally the same as Epicore’s old GB Cam. Score!

  7. Bryony Thomas Smith Avatar

    I got dxp especially for the overlay because you recommended it and it doesn’t work and crashed every time I try! Lame sauce! 🙁

  8. DocPop Avatar

    Sorry to hear that! This list is a couple years old, and I’m not sure how often the devs update it, but I just tested DXP on my iPhone 4S with OS6 and it still works for me.
    Try writing the devs for some help maybe?

    -Doctor Popular
    Photographer & Community Manager for Sincerely
    http://www.Sincerely.com
    http://www.DocPop.org
    415-724-9267

  9. Christopher A. Meza Avatar
    Christopher A. Meza

    Hey when I use Juxtamaster. I paste many overlay stamps and the more I paste on the base picture the more the whole picture becomes blurry. Do you know how to fix this?

  10. DocPop Avatar

    Sorry, I don’t use Juxtamaster, but one thing that comes to mind is maybe the problem could come from the size of the images you are adding on top. If you start with a high res image, but then layer on lower res files, it might be downgrading your main image instead of up-rezing your new layers. Just a thought.

  11. Rozen Shrestha Avatar
    Rozen Shrestha

    how these apps use image to overlay on camera live view?

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