Saturday, April 27, 2013

TECH/SMARTPHONE SPECIAL...Use free apps to modify your smartphone photos


Use free apps to modify your smartphone photos 

Improve the quality and add zany effects to your phone pictures by downloading these apps. The options for various operating systems.

ANDROID and iOS
Pho.to Lab
If you want to create fun montages, collages, contact icons or phone wallpapers, go for this app. It includes over 500 photo effects and filters, and once you're done, the edited image can be stored on the phone or shared directly on various social networks. Pho.to Lab is also available as a free online photo editor (pho.to). USP: It features intelligent face detection, which automatically adjusts and places a person’s face onto a montage.
Adobe Photoshop Express
Adobe’s photo app allows you to crop, rotate and flip images. You can also add borders, filters and effects, besides adjusting colour, saturation and contrast. The app also offers an Adobe camera pack for the iPhone (paid for via in-app purchase). This lets you reduce noise in camera images as well as set a timer. USP: Adobe gives you 2 GB free cloud storage for your photos and videos if you create a free
photoshop.comaccount through the app.
PhotoFunia
It allows you to add zany effects like broken glass, engraving and lego. It’s also available on other platforms like Windows, Symbian, Palm and BlackBerry.
USP: It lets you place yourself in over 300 different scenes. So you can see yourself on a billboard, in an art gallery or morphed into another picture.
Pixlr-o-matic
It offers over 100 effects, 280 overlays and 200 borders. The interface is easy to use and you can save or share your edited images through the app. It is also available online—on Facebook, as a Chrome Web app, and as a Windows/Mac download.
USP: The app allows you to tweak images in various permutations and combinations.
Fotolr
Fotolr offers 22 commonly used photo editing and picture effects. It has an inbuilt photo album, where you can alter skin colour, remove blemishes and add wigs as well as make-up. You can also store your edited photos here. A pro version of Fotolr Photo Studio is available for iOS. It has no advertisements and costs $2.99 ( 164).
USP: The app offers a portrait makeover feature.
PicsArt
The app’s easy-to-use interface lets you enhance a picture with effects. You can add masks, frames, borders, stickers and text effects, and create collages. PicsArt has its own community, where users can share their work.
USP: You can draw on photos using various artistic brushes.
Snapseed
This lets you select an image from your gallery and adjust its white balance, saturation, contrast, aspect ratio and other details with a simple swipe. You can also give the images a vintage or grunge look, and can adjust the focus.
USP: The app lets you edit both JPEG and TIFF image formats.
Pixlr Express
The app allows an overlay of multiple effects. You can pick an existing photo from the gallery or snap a new one. The user interface let you apply and remove effects with a live preview of the image. It also offers useful editing tools, such as focal blur, reduction of noise and removal of the red-eye effect.
USP: It offers more than 600 effects to choose from. WINDOWS PHONE
PhotoFX free
Upload an image from your photo gallery to add effects like vintage, lomo (toy camera) and emo through easy swipe-to-apply actions. You can also customise the intensity of each effect. A Pro version of this app offers more features for $1.49 ( 82).
Picture Perfect
This app has all the usual effects—colour balance, crop, rotate, contrast, brightness and saturation—with editing options like red-eye reduction and blemish removal. The app also has fun stickers, which can be added to images, along with an option to draw and add text. BLACKBERRY
Photo Studio
Linked to BBM, this app lets you apply over 100 effects and filters to your photos, along with basic transformation options like crop, resize and rotate. It also has a PicFrame feature, which combines multiple images to create a single stylish frame.
A+ Picture effects
Other than basic image manipulation, the app offers various effects, such as blur, painting, comic, and so on. You can adjust the colour temperature, gamma, hue and saturation. You can share the edited images via BBM or directly with your social networks.
Hitesh Raj Bhagat & Karan Bajaj ETW130415



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